Case Study: National Rail Enquiries achieves 20% infrastructure cost savings and dynamic scalability with Amazon Web Services

National Rail Enquiries - Customer Case Study

National Rail Enquiries (NRE) is the centralized online journey‑planning and information service for UK train operating companies, handling more than a million weekday visits and millions of app downloads. Facing an expiring data‑center contract, NRE relied on two traditional data centers with hundreds of always‑on servers provisioned for rare peak events (3–4x normal load), leaving most capacity idle and offering no flexibility to respond to sudden demand spikes during disruptions.

NRE moved to a commoditized AWS infrastructure with APN partner KCOM, using Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, RDS Multi‑AZ, Direct Connect and VPNs across dual Availability Zones, reducing its footprint from ~200 physical servers to ~140 virtual instances. The migration cut infrastructure costs by about 20%, shifted from CAPEX to OPEX, improved agility for provisioning and testing, and maintained high availability during extreme loads (a 60% higher‑than‑normal peak during a severe storm).

National Rail Enquiries

Gary Ashby

Hosting Strategy Lead