Case study: Digital transformation of one of Brazil’s largest airlines in just one year, migrating the main operational system and over 80 applications to the cloud in Kubernetes environments

In 2020, pre-COVID pandemic era, part of the Technology team at Gol, together with the company's business areas, created a roadmap to identify which systems could be migrated to the cloud. Until that time, 100% of the company's applications had been run on-premise. The digital transformation warning flag had already been raised indicating a need to modernize systems and infrastructure.

In the midst of this process, the project to modernize the company's digital channels took precedence over anything else and became top priority for the Technology team. These digital channels represent Gol's core system. Searches, purchases, check-in, and post-sales for airline tickets are carried out via the system, by both individuals and partner companies.

In order to meet this challenge, Gol decided to hire specialists for support along their journey to the cloud, and among them was Getup. “We needed a partner who could support us in an environment with Kubernetes”, comments Marcos Fabio Faria, Technology manager at Gol.

Moving forward with the restructure of digital channels, the IT team again reviewed the list of inventoried systems and was able to assess that 80 could also be adapted to run in the cloud. With Getup’s support for Kubernetes environments, the entire migration effort was able to be accomplished in one year! “Without Getup, we wouldn’t have been able to complete our application modernization journey with Kubernetes. In addition to extensive knowledge in Kubernetes, the Getup team participated in the project a lot: they helped in crises, supported with logs, structuring and troubleshooting, and gave suggestions on code. Getup does fantastic work”, says Marcos.

With the migration to digital, 80% of Gol's applications are currently in the cloud, and 50% of the business runs on Kubernetes. Among the many advantages of this transformation, highlights for Gol include: scalability that allows infrastructure to grow or shrink as needed; resilience of applications; economization of management and infrastructure costs; greater agility in time to market; and stability during periods of high volume access.