Executive Summary
By accelerating onboarding and simplifying workflows, Virgin Australia reclaimed up to 300 hours per month for their developers and testers. They were also able to improve visibility and standardization across their Kafka environment, as well as accelerate development cycles and data utilization.
Virgin Australia is one of the most popular airlines in its home country, earning approximately $5.4 billion in revenue in 2024, transporting nearly 19.2 million passengers, and boasting an impressive 99.4% on-time departure rate for domestic flights.
300 hr. / mo.
Reclaimed by simplifying workflows for developers and testers.
Challenges in Kafka adoption
In order to maintain its competitive edge, Virgin embarked on an ambitious initiative to modernize and replatform its legacy systems, with Kafka at the core of its efforts. However, the team soon encountered some challenges, including:
Limited visibility: Teams lacked intuitive tools to effectively visualize and troubleshoot Kafka data flows.
Complex user access: Provisioning users onto Confluent Cloud and controlling access for diverse user groups, from developers to testers, was time consuming and inefficient.
Fragmented operations: Without centralized tools, collaboration and operational efficiency were hindered.
To address these issues, Virgin Australia implemented Conduktor Desktop in 2022, empowering users to monitor, manage, and maintain their Kafka data flows. Teams could more efficiently diagnose and debug issues, accelerate onboarding for new users and projects, and even increase developer productivity and autonomy by reducing reliance on central platform teams.
Growing pains: bottlenecks in productivity and collaboration
However, as Kafka adoption grew, provisioning licenses and maintaining local installations became increasingly difficult for the platform team, creating bottlenecks for innovation.
“With Desktop, we had to provision accounts, issue API keys, and manage individual licenses,” Scot McPhee, a Platform Engineer at Virgin Australia, explains. “It was okay for developers but cumbersome for other users like testers and analysts.”
As their Kafka journey progressed, the Virgin Australia team realized that they needed a more centralized approach to support the growth and diverse demands of their user base.
Moving to Conduktor Scale: more power, less complexity
To address these new challenges and standardize their Kafka user experience, Virgin Australia upgraded to Conduktor Scale at the end of 2024.
"The migration from Desktop to Conduktor Scale was pretty seamless and made user provisioning and access to Kafka significantly easier. Updates are now instantly available to everyone, and features like SSO integration or user group management ease our operations and increase Kafka adoption."
Scot M. - Platform Engineer at Virgin Australia
With Scale, Virgin Australia teams could now:
Centralize deployment with automatic user updates, eliminating the need for individualized software installations.
Simplify user management, thereby facilitating operations like onboarding and access provisioning.
Comprehensive visibility into Kafka flows through powerful, built-in tools or via integrations with third-party observability solutions.
Prevent issues from impacting downstream applications by rapidly detecting, investigating, and debugging issues.
Accelerate development cycles and enhance data quality by enabling testers and developers to efficiently access and validate Kafka data during projects.
The Results: Efficiency and Adoption Soar
The use of Conduktor Scale has delivered quantifiable improvements, including:
Increased efficiency. By simplifying workflows, the team collectively saved significant amounts of time—roughly 48 hours per week for testers and 20 hours per week for developers.
Widespread adoption. A diverse range of users, including testers and even less technical roles such as analysts, now actively use Kafka for their projects.
Shortened investigations and resolutions. Teams can use advanced tools and visualizations to better understand and troubleshoot their Kafka environment.
Beyond these measurable gains, Scot also highlighted the “unquantifiable” value of Conduktor Scale. “Being able to share data seamlessly and collaborate across teams without friction has saved countless hours,” Scot explains. “It’s improved the quality of questions and insights we receive, which boosts overall productivity in ways that are hard to quantify.”
“With Conduktor Scale, it’s so much easier for developers, analysts, and testers to get a handle on the data they need, how it all flows, and resolve issues quickly,” Scot concludes. “It’s been a game changer for efficiency and adoption.”
What the future holds for Virgin Australia
Kafka is the cornerstone of Virgin Australia’s modernization, and Conduktor has played a significant role in helping Virgin Australia maximize the potential of this exciting technology. With Conduktor, the team has expanded data access, reduced developer overhead, standardized the Kafka user experience, and improved operational efficiency.
Currently, Virgin Australia utilizes Kafka to power several real-time use cases, such as streaming flight data to internal and external consumers, as well as ingesting booking information from third-party travel sites to update flyer profiles.
With Kafka and Conduktor, the Virgin Australia team can support even more business verticals and streaming data applications, positioning it for future growth in a complex, competitive industry.
South Bank, Queensland, Australia
5,001-10,000
