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.
Yeah, I almost didn't post it here for that reason, but as you said if you skim and pay attention to the ideas rather than the presentation then there is something interesting in there.
Yeah, I almost didn't post it here for that reason, but as you said if you skim and pay attention to the ideas rather than the presentation then there is something interesting in there.
For me, the problem is that I have no way of knowing how much of this is based on real expertise, and how much is just the AI trying to remember what it has read on the internet. After looking...
For me, the problem is that I have no way of knowing how much of this is based on real expertise, and how much is just the AI trying to remember what it has read on the internet. After looking through the author's LinkedIn, I'm even more convinced this is all hallucinations, it seems to me like the author is trying to drum up consulting business while never having worked in the airline ticketing industry.
If I want a conversation with a chatbot about a given topic, I'm happy to go do that, and I have had lots of productive conversations! But if I'm reading an article, I want it to be written by someone who knows what they're talking about.
Surprised that there's no passing mentions of ATPCO, the EDIFACT format (and the industry shift to NDC), or departure control systems, but those are cliffhangers for the next part. They're kind of...
Surprised that there's no passing mentions of ATPCO, the EDIFACT format (and the industry shift to NDC), or departure control systems, but those are cliffhangers for the next part. They're kind of important if you're talking about the airline booking stack.
I still don't get how everything about what they posted was relevant to their talk nor how containers fit into it besides sprinkling their company name around, might just be a wording thing with "company booked a flight for me and I started thinking of how to make a blog post on how airline booking systems work".
The best overview I've seen for the curious and want something deeper than Wendover's videos on how these systems work are these series of short videos. Lots of generic B-roll that make them feel like mandatory training from HR and things like NDC are slowly changing things under the hood, but the concepts behind things like what GDS does still hold up:
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.
Too many AI-assisted non sequiturs... but there are a few interesting nuggets if you skim and don't think too hard
Yeah, I almost didn't post it here for that reason, but as you said if you skim and pay attention to the ideas rather than the presentation then there is something interesting in there.
For me, the problem is that I have no way of knowing how much of this is based on real expertise, and how much is just the AI trying to remember what it has read on the internet. After looking through the author's LinkedIn, I'm even more convinced this is all hallucinations, it seems to me like the author is trying to drum up consulting business while never having worked in the airline ticketing industry.
If I want a conversation with a chatbot about a given topic, I'm happy to go do that, and I have had lots of productive conversations! But if I'm reading an article, I want it to be written by someone who knows what they're talking about.
Surprised that there's no passing mentions of ATPCO, the EDIFACT format (and the industry shift to NDC), or departure control systems, but those are cliffhangers for the next part. They're kind of important if you're talking about the airline booking stack.
I still don't get how everything about what they posted was relevant to their talk nor how containers fit into it besides sprinkling their company name around, might just be a wording thing with "company booked a flight for me and I started thinking of how to make a blog post on how airline booking systems work".
The best overview I've seen for the curious and want something deeper than Wendover's videos on how these systems work are these series of short videos. Lots of generic B-roll that make them feel like mandatory training from HR and things like NDC are slowly changing things under the hood, but the concepts behind things like what GDS does still hold up: