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Oracle
Industry: Travel & Transport

Powering ITSO’s Smart Ticketing Platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The migration delivered a roughly 50% reduction in cloud costs, predictable monthly billing, improved stability for a mission-critical platform and freed ITSO’s technical teams to focus on product innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.

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Contents

Project Overview

ITSO, the organisation responsible for the UK’s national smart ticketing standard, migrated its cloud-native Yotra platform from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to address escalating and unpredictable cloud costs while maintaining high availability for a nationally critical service. By moving to OCI’s architecture and fully managed Kubernetes and PostgreSQL services, ITSO reduced cloud operating costs by approximately 50%, improved performance predictability, and significantly reduced operational overhead, without refactoring its application or sacrificing architectural openness.

Key Business Objectives

  • Regain control over cloud costs. 
    While AWS initially delivered scalability benefits, costs became increasingly unpredictable as the platform matured, particularly around processing and data movement. For a nationally critical service, ITSO needed a cloud model that was not only cheaper but financially predictable and easier to forecast over the long term.
  • Maintain reliability and performance for critical national infrastructure.
    The Yotra platform underpins daily travel for millions of passengers across the UK. Any cloud strategy had to ensure consistent performance, high availability, and the ability to scale confidently under peak demand without introducing operational risk.
  • Reduce operational overhead and complexity. 
    ITSO wanted its engineering teams to focus on product development and innovation rather than managing Kubernetes clusters, databases, and infrastructure plumbing. Moving to fully managed cloud services was a deliberate objective to “keep the lights on” with minimal effort.
  • Preserve architectural openness and avoid vendor lock-in.
    From the outset, ITSO had invested in a cloud-native, open-standards architecture using Kubernetes and PostgreSQL. A key objective was to retain this flexibility, ensuring the platform could evolve or move again in the future without major refactoring or dependency on proprietary services.
  • Create a future-ready platform for innovation and growth.
    Beyond solving immediate cost and manageability issues, ITSO wanted a cloud foundation that would support data strategy improvements, modernise legacy systems, and enable future capabilities such as AI-driven services, while continuing to support an inclusive transport ecosystem across the UK.
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“Working with DSP has enabled us to move quicker, with a higher level of successful delivery than just going it alone working alongside our incumbent teams to augment our collective capabilities.”

Steve Holden
CEO | ITSO

The Challenge

ITSO is a UK government-backed organisation that defines and manages the interoperable smart ticketing standard used across public transport networks in England, Wales, and Scotland. The ITSO standard supports travel across buses, rail, trams, and ferries, and underpins both commercial ticketing and concessionary travel schemes for millions of passengers, including elderly, young, and unbanked users.

To expand the reach of smart ticketing beyond physical cards, ITSO developed Yotra, a digital platform that brings ITSO-compliant ticketing to mobile wallets and wearable devices. The platform works with transport operators, regional authorities, and national government bodies, making it a foundational component of the UK’s transport ecosystem.

Yotra was originally built on-premises before moving to AWS to gain elasticity and handle peak demand more effectively. While AWS initially met those needs, over time, ITSO began to encounter growing challenges. Cloud costs became increasingly difficult to predict, with charges associated with processing and data movement rising faster than anticipated. Although the platform was cloud-native, managing Kubernetes and associated services still required significant effort, and long-term cost forecasting became a concern for a business operating at a national scale.

Before embarking on the migration, ITSO defined success clearly. The organisation wanted to regain control over cloud costs without compromising performance or resilience, maintain a fully open and cloud-native architecture, and reduce the operational burden on its engineering teams so they could focus on delivering new capabilities rather than managing infrastructure.

The Solution

Services Implemented:
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  • Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)
  • OCI Managed PostgreSQL
  • OCI Container Registry (OCR)
  • Cloud-native containerised microservices
  • Kubernetes orchestration
  • OCI networking
  • OCI Cloud Guard
  • OCI Vulnerability Scanning
  • OCI Cost Analysis and Reporting

From the outset, ITSO made a deliberate architectural decision to adopt open, cloud-native technologies. Yotra was built using containerised microservices orchestrated with Kubernetes, supported by PostgreSQL and event-driven components. This approach avoided deep dependency on proprietary platform services and ensured portability between cloud providers.

This architectural discipline proved critical when ITSO began evaluating alternatives to AWS. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stood out not because it required refactoring or redesign, but precisely because it did not. OCI allowed ITSO to lift and deploy its existing cloud-native workloads with minimal change, while immediately benefiting from a different cost and operational model.

On OCI, Yotra runs on Oracle Kubernetes Engine, a fully managed Kubernetes service that removes the need for manual cluster maintenance and upgrades. PostgreSQL is provided as a managed service, further reducing operational overhead. Container images are hosted in OCI Container Registry, while OCI’s networking architecture delivers high-performance, low-latency connectivity and predictable data transfer costs.

Although Oracle is traditionally associated with its own database technologies, this deployment demonstrates OCI’s role as a general-purpose cloud platform. Yotra does not use Oracle Database at all, reinforcing ITSO’s commitment to an open, vendor-agnostic architecture.

DSP brought deep DevOps and cloud-native delivery expertise to the project, supporting the design, migration, and operationalisation of Kubernetes-based workloads on OCI. As an Oracle-recognised partner, DSP provided best-practice DevOps capabilities including cloud-native architecture design, Kubernetes operations, CI/CD enablement, and migration execution, ensuring the platform was production-ready, scalable, and maintainable from day one.

The Implementation

The migration was delivered through close collaboration between DSP, ITSO, and Oracle. The project progressed through environment setup, workload deployment, data migration, and validation under production-level load, with a strong focus on operational stability.

The most significant challenge was not technical complexity but financial clarity. Under AWS, variable pricing elements made it difficult to predict costs accurately as usage evolved. OCI addressed this directly through a combination of architectural design and pricing transparency. Kubernetes control plane costs are included at no charge, compute resources can be sized precisely to workload requirements rather than fixed instance tiers, and data egress costs are substantially reduced.

These changes transformed cloud spend from a source of uncertainty into a predictable operating cost, enabling ITSO to plan confidently for future growth.

The Result

The impact of the migration was immediate and measurable. ITSO achieved an approximate 50% reduction in cloud operating costs compared to AWS, while also improving resource utilisation. Performance became more predictable, and the platform demonstrated the stability required for a nationally critical service relied upon daily by millions of passengers.

Equally important was the operational impact. By using fully managed Kubernetes and database services, ITSO significantly reduced the time its teams spent on infrastructure maintenance. Engineers were able to focus on building new features, improving data quality, and exploring future capabilities rather than managing clusters, patches, and upgrades.

For a service that supports essential transport infrastructure, the confidence that “it just works” became a major business advantage.

Future Outlook

With OCI as its cloud foundation, ITSO is now well-positioned to modernise further. The organisation is already using Autonomous Database and APEX within other parts of the business to modernise legacy applications, while also exploring OCI’s AI services to improve data quality, insight, and automation. Most importantly, OCI enables ITSO to continue evolving its platforms without vendor lock-in, maintaining the open, cloud-native model that underpins its long-term strategy.

By migrating Yotra to OCI, ITSO has not only reduced costs but created a more stable, scalable, and future-ready platform to support the next generation of smart transport across the UK.

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