Legacy reservation software replaced
with a modern, mobile-friendly AWS platform
Case study – Travel & Hospitality
A legacy reservation system, reborn on AWS.
GVM Sion – one of Switzerland's oldest flight schools – was running its whole operation on ageing aircraft-reservation software: hard to maintain, no mobile, and tied to a single club. 56k.Cloud rebuilt it as Aviator, a serverless platform on AWS that GVM Sion owns going forward – and now rents as a service to other flight schools too.
The problem
GVM Sion's reservation software had aged out. It wasn't mobile-friendly, it was slow to maintain, and as students and members grew it couldn't keep up with what a modern flight school needs: pilots pulling up-to-date aircraft documentation and checklists, instructors tracking student progress, and the club following flight hours and maintenance issues. Everything the system didn't cover fell back to manual admin – time taken away from flying.
- keep the daily workflows the school and its 300+ members depend on
- mobile-friendly, so pilots reach it from the apron, not just a desk
- documentation, checklists and safety info always current for every aircraft
- student-progress and flight-time tracking built in, not run on the side in spreadsheets
- a maintainable platform that could serve more than one school
The architecture
56k.Cloud built Aviator as a cloud-native serverless application on AWS.
Business logic runs on AWS Lambda, so the backend scales with demand instead of sitting on servers someone has to keep alive. Amazon API Gateway fronts the API and authenticates requests with JWT tokens, Amazon DynamoDB is the primary database, and Amazon Cognito handles user identity and access. The whole environment is provisioned with Infrastructure-as-Code, and every application and infrastructure change is tested and deployed through CI/CD pipelines. On top sits a modern Next.js frontend – an interactive aircraft reservation calendar and analytics dashboards the school uses to watch aircraft activity. And because it's multi-tenant, a second, third, and further flight school can run on the same platform.
The outcome
A serverless foundation that scales with demand and only bills for what it uses.
Unified system for the whole school
pilots, instructors and admins working in one system – reservations, documentation, student progress, flight analytics
Serverless foundation
that scales with demand and only bills for what it uses
New features shipped quickly
on managed infrastructure the school doesn't have to run
Aviator now rented as a service
to other flight schools – a maintainable foundation GVM Sion owns going forward
It runs in production today – built with GVM Sion, owned by them and resold to other flight schools, and operated by us for as long as they want.