The Voices behind the Podcast
In the AWS podcast Cloud Horizonte, Dominik Sommer, Head of IT & Product Development at Miles & More, shares how Europe’s largest travel loyalty program “Miles & More” migrated its core loyalty platform to Amazon Web Services under an immovable deadline.
Having built the company’s IT platform organization and serving as the executive sponsor of the transformation, he offers first-hand insights into one of Miles & More’s most critical technology initiatives.
Joining him is Chris Deml, Solutions Architect at Loyalty Partner Solutions (LPS), who has worked with Miles & More for almost ten years. As one of the technical leads on the migration project, he was responsible for shaping the cloud architecture and guiding the implementation of the new platform together with the joint project team.
Throughout the conversation, both speakers reflect on the challenges, decisions, and lessons learned during the migration. Two statements capture the spirit of the transformation particularly well:
“Have the courage to move forward together. If you learn fast enough and have the right team, you should use that courage to make things happen.”
Chris Deml, LPS
“Once we flipped the switch, there was no going back.”
Dominik Sommer, Miles & More
Why wasn't a lift-and-shift migration enough?
Moving an existing system to the cloud without changing its architecture may seem like the fastest option. In reality, it often transfers years of technical debt into a new environment while preventing organizations from taking advantage of cloud-native capabilities.
Instead, the project became an opportunity to modernize the platform. By introducing containerized workloads and a more cloud-native architecture, the team laid the foundation for greater scalability, resilience, faster deployments, and long-term flexibility of the loyalty platform.
One of the biggest challenges wasn’t moving the application itself, it was coordinating more than one hundred integrations with internal systems and external partners. Network connectivity, DNS configurations, firewall rules, SSL certificates, and countless dependencies all had to be in place before functional testing could even begin.
The project demonstrates that successful cloud transformations are driven as much by collaboration, preparation, and agile decision-making as by technology itself. For organizations modernizing their customer loyalty platforms, technical excellence alone is not enough – cross-functional coordination is equally critical.
Planning a similar cloud transformation?
If you’re researching your own migration project, you may be asking yourself:
- How do you modernize a mission-critical loyalty platform without disrupting business operations?
- What are the biggest technical and organizational challenges during a cloud migration?
- How can agile project management help when deadlines cannot be moved?
Listen to the full episode to hear how Miles & More and LPS successfully migrated one of Europe’s largest loyalty platforms to AWS, the lessons they learned along the way, and the practical advice they would give organizations facing similar modernization projects.
