Side-by-Side Upgrades for Air Traffic Control
Client: LVNL
Challenge
LVNL, the Dutch air traffic control authority, relied on a 15-year-old air-gapped C++ application (CCIS) for secondary operational information — runway availability, weather conditions, and facility status. Every upgrade required tearing down the running system, installing the new version, testing, and rolling back on failure. On infrastructure that could not be duplicated, this consumed entire maintenance windows with install/uninstall cycles instead of actual validation.
Approach
We leveraged reactive stream processing to re-architect the application, decoupling what were singleton infrastructure components from the message-passing application pipelines. The redesigned architecture allowed multiple application versions to run side-by-side on the same shared, non-duplicable infrastructure. This eliminated the destructive tear-down/install cycle entirely.
Outcome
Full maintenance windows became available for testing and validation instead of being consumed by installation logistics. Zero downtime during upgrades on a safety-critical system. The decoupled architecture gave a 15-year-old air-gapped system a sustainable upgrade path without requiring infrastructure duplication.