Unlike the aviation sector, the rail industry still lacks standardisation. As a result, both the processes and the IT environment at NS International are highly complex. NSI hosts its applications across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Azure (via the Sprong contract), AWS, the Mendix cloud, and a more traditional utility hosting environment at KPN (DRP). The e-commerce environment itself was hosted in NS’s on-premises data centre. “We kept running into challenges,” says Pascal Reijnders, Head of IT at NS International. A clear reason to take a different approach.

“From a technical perspective, we wanted greater autonomy, control, and agility to enable faster and more frequent changes. Our starting point was that CI/CD teams should be able to release autonomously at any time, without compromising on security, compliance, or code quality. At the same time, customers should not experience disruptions. The second challenge was more organisational and cultural. If you aim for continuous delivery with small teams, expectations are high. Further automation of monitoring and environments requires high-performing teams, more senior skill sets, T-shaped profiles, and a mindset that goes beyond a nine-to-five mentality. Finally, we wanted to make the platform and environment more scalable through automation, primarily to improve cost efficiency and agility. We don’t want to pay for capacity we’re not using.”

For these reasons, NS International decided to migrate its landscape to the cloud. While NS’s general direction was towards Azure, NS International wanted to determine whether that environment would fully meet its specific requirements. Conclusion was asked to conduct an assessment. The outcome showed that the technical requirements of the e-commerce platform would be better supported by AWS. Reijnders explains: “Together with Conclusion Xforce, we set up a Proof of Concept to validate this. Based on the results, we received approval to establish an AWS landing zone alongside the existing Azure environment within NS. Since the final responsibility for these environments lies with I&O, we approached this trajectory jointly.”

One of the first steps was to establish a landing zone, providing secure access to the cloud environment and enforcing policies, particularly around security. Reijnders: “This landing zone is used across NS to maintain control over hosting platforms and enforce governance. Its management is handled by NS’s I&O Cloud department.”

A significant part of the effort then focused on modernising a legacy e-commerce application that was not cloud-native. “If you simply opt for a lift-and-shift approach, you don’t benefit from the flexibility and scalability the cloud offers, especially the ability to scale down during quieter periods,” Reijnders explains. A Solution Architect from Conclusion Xforce carefully analysed what changes were required at the application level to fully leverage the cloud stack. “We initially implemented a concept that already made use of cloud scalability, while allowing for further development and optimisation. A good example is our approach to Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). This gives us not only full visibility across our landscape, but also insight into where delays or issues occur within business chains. For instance, we correlate real-time IT performance with sales performance (via Google Analytics), enabling us to identify patterns. This also runs within our AWS environment.”

Reijnders is proud of the transformation and its outcomes, especially given the complexity of the environment NS International operates in. “We work with many partners, exchange large volumes of data, and deal with numerous dependencies and business rules. Our e-commerce environment is part of a dynamic hybrid NS landscape.  On the back end, our systems must seamlessly integrate with carrier and distribution systems in our BeNe organisation, including interfaces to reservation and inventory systems of Thalys, ICE, and Eurostar. It is essential that this chain continues to perform reliably and remains highly available in the new environment, and we have achieved that.”

The migration to AWS delivers two key business outcomes. Firstly, NS International has become significantly more agile. Changes to the website, app, and APIs can now be implemented much faster. Reijnders: “In concrete terms, where we deployed once per sprint in 2016, we are now releasing almost daily. We expect this to increase further to three to five releases per day.”

Secondly, costs have been substantially reduced and now scale in line with traffic and transactions. “We benefited greatly from this during the pandemic, when international travel fluctuated dramatically. At the same time, we expect demand to grow strongly again, as more travellers choose sustainable transport options like rail.  Where business travellers once defaulted to flying, trains are now often the first choice for destinations like Brussels or Berlin. When travel fully rebounds, we must be ready for a surge in ticket sales. Thanks to our ‘cloud unless’ strategy, we are well positioned to handle that demand.”