Sunray Group
AWS-Lambda-Service
Industry Vertical – Hospitality
The Client
Sunray Group is a family-owned, multifaceted corporation specializing in hospitality and development. Sunray believes in the strength of brand equity. The group is successfully building an ever-increasing portfolio of award-winning brands, which include Marriott, Starwood, Hilton, Radisson, Best Western, IHG, Wyndham and Choice Hotels. They have also developed prominent brands such as Tim Horton's, McDonald's, Fionn McCool’s, Shell and Petro Canada.
The Challenge
As one of the region’s largest property developers and hotel operators, Sunray required an infrastructure that could handle rapidly scaling web workloads, automate backend processing, and eliminate service disruptions. Their previous infrastructure suffered from frequent downtimes, slow performance, and costly manual interventions. In particular, the challenge was ensuring consistent uptime and cost-efficiency while simplifying management of dynamic compute workloads such as file processing, request routing, and operational automation.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Hallmark recommended leveraging AWS Lambda to move to a fully serverless architecture. AWS Lambda allowed Sunray to run backend code without managing servers, scaling automatically based on demand, and triggering on a wide range of AWS events (e.g., S3 uploads, API Gateway requests, and scheduled tasks).
Key workloads such as user request handling, reservation system triggers, and backend processing tasks were rewritten as modular Lambda functions. These functions were deployed using AWS SAM for consistent infrastructure-as-code and integrated with Amazon S3, API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB for storage and query efficiency.
Lambda enabled automation of operational workflows like:
- Image resizing and tagging for uploaded hotel media
- Scheduled cleanup of session records
- Real-time data sync to internal dashboards
With Lambda’s automatic scaling, execution of these tasks no longer required provisioned infrastructure or idle compute instances.
HOW THE ENVIRONMENT IS PROTECTED
Security and operational best practices were implemented using IAM-based permissions and encrypted environment variables. Additionally:
- IAM roles with least-privilege policies secured all Lambda function executions.
- Logs were streamed to Amazon CloudWatch for near real-time monitoring.
- Sensitive configuration parameters were stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store with encryption.
Benefits
By adopting AWS Lambda, Sunray achieved:
- 90% reduction in operational overhead related to compute provisioning
- Near-zero downtime, as Lambda scaled automatically with traffic
- Cost optimization, by paying only for execution time (per millisecond)
- Rapid development, and deployment of features using AWS SAM
- Improved observability with integrated logging and monitoring
The serverless approach ensured high availability, simplified maintenance, and enabled Sunray to focus on delivering better experiences to its hotel guests and stakeholders.
