// the find
aws-samples/aws-serverless-airline-booking
Airline Booking is a sample web application that provides Flight Search, Flight Payment, Flight Booking and Loyalty points including end-to-end testing, GraphQL and CI/CD. This web application was the theme of Build on Serverless Season 2 on AWS Twitch running from April 24th until end of August in 2019.
A reference architecture for a full airline booking app built entirely on AWS serverless services — AppSync GraphQL, DynamoDB, Lambda, Step Functions, Cognito, SNS — originally built as the subject of a 2019 AWS Twitch series. It's for developers who want to see how these AWS services actually wire together in a non-trivial app, not for anyone looking to run or extend a real booking system.
It's one of the few examples that shows multiple AWS services cooperating in a realistic workflow rather than in isolation: Step Functions orchestrating the booking process, SNS decoupling Booking from Loyalty, and AppSync doing fine-grained per-field authorization off Cognito JWTs. The Loyalty service exposing a REST API alongside the GraphQL hub is a decent pattern for showing service-to-service auth. The accompanying 14-episode Twitch series is unusually thorough documentation for a sample repo — most AWS samples ship with a README and nothing else.
The repo is explicitly dead — the README says it's no longer maintained, and the actual backend/frontend code lives on a separate `archive` branch, not on the one you'd clone by default. Heavy reliance on Apache VTL for AppSync resolvers is already outdated guidance; AWS has pushed APPSYNC_JS resolvers as the replacement specifically because VTL is miserable to write and debug. Nothing here has been touched since the 2019 build, so expect stale dependencies (Amplify CLI, Cognito config, Stripe integration) that won't deploy cleanly against current AWS tooling without real rework. The claimed end-to-end testing isn't visible from the root tree — you'd have to dig into the archive branch to verify it exists at all.