Choice Hotels Speeds Deployment, Supports Cloud Migration Using AWS Training and Certification

Born in 1939 as US hotel chain Quality Courts United, Choice Hotels represents 10 percent of US hotels and has 2,000 employees, including 500 in technology. In 2018, the company transformed its central reservation system from a 30-year-old monolithic application to a microservices application on AWS. That success, plus later financial and technical assessments, convinced Choice Hotels to go all in on AWS in 2019. “We viewed AWS as the most advanced cloud provider, and it offered a strategy for microservices implementation,” says Brian Kirkland, chief information officer at Choice Hotels. By early 2021, the company had migrated 60 percent of its systems to AWS.

Choice Hotels formed a cloud solution team to keep abreast of emerging AWS services. It also realized that it could better optimize if more employees were familiar with using AWS. In Phoenix, Arizona, the company’s technology team has engineers, program managers, and business systems analysts who have varying degrees of cloud skills and fluency. The cloud intimidated many staff members because they would have to learn new skills after 10–20 years of traditional IT. “Choice Hotels wants employees to have a career path and do new, exciting things,” says Kirkland. “Training helps us level the playing field by meeting them at their level and developing their cloud skills.”

Choice Hotels invested in its employees by using AWS Virtual Classroom Training, which offers a live classroom learning experience. Over a 6-month period, Choice Hotels trained 400 employees in 22 AWS Virtual Classroom Trainings. Employees had the opportunity to receive general training and targeted technical training in architecting, developing, big data, machine learning, security, and DevOps. Of the 20 employees on the cloud engineering solution team, 8 achieved AWS Certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer. To help employees get certified, Choice Hotels dedicated time to employee development. In return, the company saw an increase in excitement and adoption of AWS technologies, enabling it to migrate faster and take advantage of the services AWS offers.

Less than 3 months after training, Choice Hotels has a 93 percent adoption rate of its Harness continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) software. “People are now more comfortable in the cloud,” says Kirkland. “We didn’t segment this training. An infrastructure person could take an advanced architecting course. We saw a dramatic shift in how staff embraced the migration. They were more willing to engage and more comfortable sharing ideas to make things go quickly.”

Choice Hotels used AWS Training and Certification to give employees new perspectives on working in the cloud, encouraging them to consider things like costs as they build. “Many developers never see the impact of spinning up 20 servers,” explains Kirkland. “After using AWS Training and Certification, we have seen a consistent cost decrease, even as we enable employees to work on AWS.” For example, the company’s use of introductory courses like AWS Technical Essentials—which dives into the foundations of cloud computing, storage, and networking on AWS—has helped onboard employees to the cloud. “Staff know to ask, ‘How much compute will this need? What services?’” says Kirkland. “They put into practice what they learn, and that changes how we plan for costs, calculate total cost of ownership, and present business cases as true representations of costs and benefits.”

Since the training, Choice Hotels has increased speed to market. The company now performs multiple deployments a week compared to single large deployments previously. Before training completed, Choice Hotels staff created a containers proof of concept on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which offers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS. The company also supports that proof of concept by using AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers. “Architecting courses explained the services available,” says Kirkland. “We knew that we needed to develop and adopt a container and serverless architecture to save money and increase speed to market. Training is helping us go from proof of concept to enterprise rollout in less than 1 year.”

The company has a small team responsible for supporting all databases within Choice Hotels across multiple technologies. To increase understanding, support, and advancement of its data strategy, the company encouraged employees from the IT team to enroll in training. “We want developers to have a sense of how a database schema works and the opportunities there are to use AWS-managed databases,” says Kirkland. “As we move into the database assessment for the next year’s migration, it’s been helpful to have more people who can assist with the plan.”

Almost 80 Choice Hotels employees went through security training, such as AWS Security Essentials, which covers fundamental AWS security concepts, and Security Engineering on AWS, which demonstrates how to efficiently use AWS security services. “Security is everyone’s responsibility, not just the security team’s,” says Kirkland. “Now people understand that they have to figure out security as they code rather than leave it till the end.” Employees who completed big data and machine learning courses have used Amazon EMR, a cloud big data solution for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools, to create fraud detection components.