Gogo adopts AWS
March 14, 2019
By Chris Forrester
In-Flight Entertainment specialists Gogo is adopting Amazon’s cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host its entire infrastructure to AWS, going all-in on the world’s leading cloud-based service.
Gogo says it has already migrated the vast majority of its commercial and business aviation divisions to AWS and is leveraging a range of AWS services, including analytics, serverless, database, and storage to improve inflight internet and entertainment experiences for millions of passengers around the world.
With AWS, Gogo says it is able to double the number of airlines it can support without increasing the size of its workforce and take an idea from concept to production much faster. By moving business-critical databases, including payments, orders, user management, and backend services off legacy databases to Amazon Aurora, Gogo lowered its operational overhead and gained the speed and availability of a commercial database with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source.
Chicago-HQ’d Gogo says that it is using AWS Media Elemental Live video processing and delivery to provide the consistency and low latency required for live and on-demand video services on board more than 2,500 commercial aircraft flying at 30,000 feet.
“We chose AWS because it is the most sophisticated and mature cloud in the industry,” said Ravi Balwada, SVP/Software Development at Gogo. “The change in velocity that we experienced moving from our on-premises environment to AWS has been phenomenal. By operating and innovating on AWS, we’ve been able to nearly eliminate customer-impacting incidents related to ground-based deployments and increase our deployment cadence sevenfold. And, our database change has made operating at scale much easier and more cost effective.”
Gogo uses multiple satellites to actually beam its content and receive requests from passengers.