Miles & More GmbH modernises IT architecture

Miles & More GmbH, operator of Europe's largest frequent flyer and awards program, now uses Red Hat’s container and cloud technologies to deliver a scalable and automated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment. The new architecture is designed to support Miles & More GmbH to realize innovations and to bring new microservices-based applications more quickly to the market.

Based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Miles & More GmbH is a fully-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Lufthansa AG. With the program, participants can earn and spend with almost 40 airline partners, including 28 airlines belonging to the Star Alliance, as well as with more than 270 companies such as hotels, rental cars, cruises, banks and insurance providers. Previously, for its interfaces with partners outside of the air travel sector, the company used a middleware solution.

Together with Red Hat, the company developed a new platform based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to implement innovations more easily in the future. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from Linux containers, Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure and stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, enabling mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

Alongside Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Miles & More GmbH has deployed:

• Red Hat JBoss Fuse, a robust, flexible, and easy to use platform for integrating applications, data, and services.
• Ansible by Red Hat, a simple, agentless IT automation platform that supports provisioning, application deployment, complex workflow orchestration, and configuration management for IT systems, networks, and applications.
• Red Hat JBoss AMQ, a standards-based messaging platform for exchanging information between applications.

For the planning, architecture design, and the technical implementation, Miles & More GmbH worked closely with Red Hat Consulting, Red Hat’s Technical Account Management team, and its service provider partner.

With the new IT architecture, Miles & More GmbH can integrate its partners more flexibly and easily into its loyalty program and manage them more efficiently. In addition, the architecture also enables the company to bring new services to market faster and to scale its application requirements. Initial evaluations by the company indicate that the time-to-market for its services has improved by 15 percent and a new microservice can be developed much faster and transferred to the live system without interrupting the system. Miles & More has already developed 40 microservices for communicating with its partner companies, including the ‘Earn miles’ and ‘Spend miles’ program. In the future, the company expects to carry out all new projects as microservices and is specifically planning to implement a microservices architecture for its website: http://www.miles-and-more.com.