AWS for Industries

Smiles gains advantages using serverless-first strategy with AWS

In this blog post, we delve into the journey of Smiles Fidelidade, a loyalty company affiliated with Gol Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes (GOL) Airlines. Smiles has partnerships with over fifty airlines and a customer base exceeding 21.8 million active users. To better serve these customers, the company adopted a serverless-first strategy to improve agility, responsiveness, and the overall customer experience.

The challenge Smiles wanted to solve

Smiles wanted to streamline their operations and build a more agile and responsive system to make the traveler experience journey more robust and user centric. Their application deployment and management revolved around clusters, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Docker containers.

While these technologies offered significant advantages, they had their share of challenges, including a heavy infrastructure management burden. Constantly changing scalability needs, especially to support agile and quick marketing campaigns that generated sudden bursts of traffic to their applications, were also a challenge.

Furthermore, these technologies demanded continuous attention from the Smiles infrastructure team. They required regular configuration management, patching, and securing—resulting in a considerable workload.

The journey to serverless on AWS

Smiles first adopted a serverless-first strategy for their rewards program app, which proved to be transformative. They used multiple AWS services, including:

Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate: Smiles primarily used Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) with AWS Fargate for pricing transactions such as domestic and international flights, seat purchases, baggage allowances, and other products. This type of architecture empowered fast and autonomous scalability to meet business needs such as promotions.

AWS initially did a proof-of-concept to validate that Fargate could meet their needs without worrying about infrastructure management. This helped them migrate several production workloads to Fargate, further supporting their integrations with partners and service platform flows.

AWS Lambda: Smiles needed to respond to customer requests on a large scale so they chose AWS Lambda, an event driven, serverless computing platform. All integrations from Smiles frontend applications to their middleware layer and backend services were architected using Lambda with an Amazon API Gateway. Smiles also used Lambda in integrations with partners and data lake processes.

Lambda offered the ability to run code without the provisioning and management of servers, allowing Smiles to serve an environment with hundreds of integrations without having to manage the computational capacity to fulfill requests.

Smiles’s flight search service was developed entirely in Lambda, handling more than 500 requests per second at peak times without needing any infrastructure management.

Amazon EventBridge: The company used Amazon EventBridge to link to its software as a service (SaaS) applications, such as ZenDesk. The events from their SaaS applications were used to start workflows for customer support, business operations, and other purposes.

This allowed Smiles to create a decoupled architecture for its applications with the ability to filter based on data within the event. Smiles was also able to create a central event bus and routing between microservices, giving them more flexibility to change business rules by modifying the events within EventBridge.

Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS: Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) provided integrations with partner processes to control queues and guarantee processing and notifications in case of failures.

Smiles builds a new checkout process

Based on the benefits noted using a serverless approach in the rewards program, Smiles decided to also design its checkout architecture with serverless services.

Smiles uses one of the digital channels (for example, Portal, Chat, or Marketplace) to interact with AWS services to run the Smiles processes. Some of the referred flows must communicate with external services such as Sabre, which is responsible for generating the airline tickets for GOL Airlines. The core critical business case for Smiles is explained in detail below:

Figure 1 – Smiles checkout architectureFigure 1 – Smiles checkout architecture

Integrated airline ticket creation and miles redemption:

  1. The customer accesses one of the digital channel frontends: A portal provided by Akamai (the content delivery network (CDN)) in conjunction with Liferay as the content management system.
  2. The customer manages their carts through the create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations through the APIs running on API Gateway. To permit only authenticated users access, Auth0 provides tokens for API Gateway to be able to identify the customer.
  3. The customer completes the cart operations sequence and proceeds to the checkout to provide their payment information, where AWS Step Functions, Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB orchestrate the workflows, invoke the functions, and interact with the data stores.
  4. The order processing must follow specific steps in a specific order. The entire order processing flow is enabled by an event-driven architecture using EventBridge.
  5. The airline ticketing system needs to communicate with external services, some of which are provided by partners and others managed by the Smiles team. The external service responsible for issuing the ticket on behalf of GOL Airlines is Sabre.
  6. The airline ticketing system charges the customer by communicating with external payment gateways.
  7. The airline ticketing system redeems the customer miles by communicating with Siebel CRM (a customer relationship management application).

Outcomes

Embracing a serverless-first operating model marked a change in Smiles’s application development and management, offering significant benefits.

One of the benefits Smiles observed was cost efficiency. The services used offer a pay-as-you-go model, so Smiles was billed only for resources when used. This model further reduced their expenses related to infrastructure maintenance. Given the usage Smiles sees, especially during peak events such as holidays and shopping seasons, the financial benefits were evident. Smiles has also seen a reduction in infrastructure costs. Today, 50 percent of Smiles’s Lambda functions run on ARM-based AWS Graviton2 processors delivering up to 19 percent better performance at a 20 percent lower cost.

Taking a serverless approach also helped Smiles become more agile. This architecture adjusts to demand; provisioning resources as needed. Its applications can manage increases in traffic without any manual interference. Today, Smiles can process more than 20 million searches per day.

Smiles was also able to achieve a faster time-to-market, delivering new features and applications at a 50 percent faster rate than before. With serverless platforms handling infrastructure management tasks, from server provisioning to patching and scaling, its development teams were able to focus on coding rather than system administration tasks. Serverless also reduced development and deployment cycles by allowing their developers to segment applications into modular, reusable functions.

Smiles’s decision to adopt a serverless framework was both a technological and strategic choice, ensuring the company remains adaptable in a fast-moving digital environment.

Conclusion

The decision to adopt a serverless architecture was an important enabler to build scalable, cost effective, and efficient applications while reducing operational overhead and improving developer productivity. Serverless is well-suited for modern, agile development practices and was a valuable choice for Smiles’s businesses in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.

Contact an AWS Representative to learn how we can help accelerate your business.

Further reading

About Smiles Fidelidade

Smiles Fidelidade, with more than 20 million customers and over 25 years of operation in Brazil, is a loyalty program that has Gol Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes (GOL) Airlines as its main shareholder and partnerships with more than fifty other airlines. The company began its journey to the cloud in 2015 and, more recently, migrated its big data analytics platform to AWS, simplifying and streamlining the data analysis process.

Ricardo Marques

Ricardo Marques

Ricardo Marques is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, with 15+ years of experience in software development, creating scalable solutions, cloud native and event driven architecture. He supports digital native clients, helping them on their journey to the cloud. He is also an MBA Professor of Cloud Architectures.

Clarinda Mascarenhas

Clarinda Mascarenhas

Clarinda is a Senior Go-to-Market (GTM) Specialist with the Worldwide Specialist Organization at AWS working closely with customers, product teams, and the wider ecosystem. She is focused on building and executing GTM strategies for fully managed, serverless compute services such as AWS Lambda and AWS App Runner.

Jaime Nagase

Jaime Nagase

Jaime Nagase has over 15 years of hands-on experience in the IT industry and is currently works as a Senior Business Development Manager at AWS. In this role, he steers all aspects of Serverless and Containers go-to-market strategies across Latin America. His expertise lies in aiding customers and partners to capitalize on technologies such as AWS Lambda, Step Functions, and Event-Driven Architectures to bring their applications up to speed and drive business transformation.

Luiz Correia

Luiz Correia

As a seasoned Solutions Architect and Creative Technologist at Smiles, Luis brings over 15 years of expertise to the realm of innovation. His commitment lies in making cutting-edge technology accessible to all, developing intelligent solutions that empower individuals, and fostering community growth. He is driven by the belief that creative technologies should be indistinguishable from works of art, a philosophy that guides his approach to every project. His passion for pushing boundaries and creating impactful solutions has been a driving force throughout his career.

Robson Agostini

Robson Agostini

Robson Agostini is the Senior IT Manager of Enterprise Architecture for Gol Linhas Aéreas and Smiles Fidelidade. He’s responsible for DevSecOps, Cloud, and SRE. Robson has more than 15 years of experience in IT and more than 5 years leading cloud and architecture high performance teams.

Rodrigo Justo

Rodrigo Justo

Rodrigo Justo is a Solutions Architect at AWS acting on Enterprise segment, helping customers from diverse industries in their cloud journeys with a focus on cloud foundations and cloud governance. With a degree in Computer Networks, Rodrigo has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, working with large financial institutions.