What's Happening?
Qantas has undertaken significant architectural changes to its API management platform, aimed at improving reliability and resiliency. The airline has been using the open-source WSO2 API Management platform since 2018, and recent upgrades have transitioned the system to an event-hub architecture. This change eliminates the need for disk space sharing between the data plane and control plane, allowing for a more agile and stateless platform. Additionally, Qantas has containerized the API management platform, aligning it with its immutable infrastructure strategy, which enhances security and maintainability. These changes have also improved observability and logging, providing deeper visibility into API traffic and platform behavior, enabling proactive error detection and troubleshooting.
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Why It's Important?
The architectural changes implemented by Qantas are crucial for maintaining a highly resilient API management platform. By eliminating dependencies on disk and database-centric deployments, the airline can ensure high availability across all components, reducing the risk of outages and critical incidents. This reliability is essential for building trust and communities around the platform, which is vital for Qantas's operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. The improvements in security and maintainability also safeguard sensitive data and enhance the platform's ability to adapt to changing traffic needs, supporting Qantas's strategic goals in digital transformation and service delivery.
What's Next?
Qantas plans to continue leveraging the event-driven architecture to extend the deployment of the data plane into different areas, such as embedding it into their service mesh. The airline will also focus on maintaining the platform's high resiliency and reliability, ensuring it can withstand issues in various components or its main database. Future efforts may include further enhancements to the unified API lifecycle management interface, embedding governance and control logic to ensure security assessments are implemented before API exposure to the internet.
Beyond the Headlines
The architectural changes at Qantas reflect broader trends in the airline industry towards digital transformation and enhanced cybersecurity measures. By adopting a more resilient and secure API management platform, Qantas sets a precedent for other airlines to follow, potentially influencing industry standards and practices. The focus on building communities around the platform highlights the importance of collaboration and shared knowledge in driving innovation and improving service delivery.
