Project Description

Challenge

Our client is a global Fortune 100 and well known leader in the airline industry. We led and assisted the client’s software development team with key back-end web application developments, including their flagship customer-facing website.

Solution

For the past several years, we have provided a large number of software development & related consulting services, including architecture review & advisory, developer mentoring & coordination, web application security & session management developments, web application monitoring service developments, and web application performance testing & optimization. Specifically, our solutions have included:

  1. The common web service providing security, session management, state management, instrumentation and tracing for all customer facing applications, including the airport and contact center agent applications, the mobile application suite and the flagship customer-facing web site, together supporting over 30,000 concurrent users and processing over 2000 requests per second.
  2. A foundational session state service to enable shared state per session across applications. The service is scalable, tested on a 55 node farm. The service allows applications to share session and state using shared tokens. The service is leveraged by all of the major channels and all of the business web services.
  3. A claims-based security solution for the client’s reservation center agent portal for handling calls. The solution includes a management application to maintain the claim value data and mappings to user groups and users. The solution also includes the ability for approved users to create temporary claim value overrides for elevated privileges during crisis situations.
  4. The component for runtime instrumentation to record system activity with a view toward speeding up reactions to critical scenarios such as exception conditions and security violations. All of the core business web services leverage the instrumentation component.
  5. A Windows service to monitor the business REST WebAPI web services. The monitoring service uses metadata understand which services to monitor and which operations to call on each service. It calls them on intervals and supports a limited configuration to determine when a notification should occur. Notifications occur via email and text messages and report alerts and recoveries.
  6. A configuration management component that allows applications to centralize their configuration information

In addition to these developments, we also participated in and led various performance tests involving pieces of the business web services infrastructure and individual services. The tests involved a large and complex performance testing environment mirroring production that included a farm of 30 nodes as well as technology-specific mocked and test instances representing key infrastructure elements such as the IBM mainframe, ORACLE, third party web services and other critical systems. Throughout the tests, we typically pursued an iterative style of test, analyze, tune, re-test and evaluate.