This is the first of a six-part series on a lot of the behind-the-scenes of air ticket booking, with a focus specifically on Amadeus since that's what his tickets went through.
I was going to speak at ContainerDays 2026. A conference about containers, orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure: the kind of modern, ephemeral, stateless systems I spend my working life thinking about.
The irony only hit me on the flight over.
The infrastructure that booked those flights traces its design to the 1960s. It still runs on lineages that predate Unix and speaks command languages built for teletypes. The implementations, hardware, and surrounding software have been replaced and upgraded many times. What persists is the data model, the protocols, and the transaction semantics. None of that happened in a single rewrite: it accumulated while the system kept flying, and at peak it still handles on the order of 10,000 transactions per second.
This is the first of a six-part series on a lot of the behind-the-scenes of air ticket booking, with a focus specifically on Amadeus since that's what his tickets went through.
This is the first of a six-part series on a lot of the behind-the-scenes of air ticket booking, with a focus specifically on Amadeus since that's what his tickets went through.