Executive Summary

American Airlines are one of the famous airlines globally. Ever since a long time the airline is facing technical & maintenance issues. The airline adopted IBM cloud solution but is still in trouble due to its legacy system & incapability to analyse huge real time data and draw useful insights over the competitions. AWS provides wide range of solutions and tools not only to solve technical problems but also to improve overall business productivity and performance. AWS provides services which are highly available, scalable, secure and at a low cost. Services like EC2, S3, RDS, Glacier, ELB, Route53 and more will provide better solutions to the problems currently experienced by AA. In this report we provide possible solutions to the problems, information about selection and justification of AWS technologies, cloud environment, VPC structure and few successful stories of existing airlines adopting AWS solution for similar problems.

Table of Content 

Executive Summary

Introduction

Existing Cloud Architecture

Challenges for American Airlines

Infrastructure Issues

Technical Issues

Possible Solutions

Technologies Used

Environment & Availability Zones

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Justification

Successful Stories

Conclusion

Future Scope

References

Table of Figures
 

Figure 1 Vmware HCX IBM Architecture

Figure 2 Cloud Global Market Share

Figure 3 american airlines presence in world

Figure 4 number of availability zones per aws region

Figure 5 time for data transfer across region

Figure 6 ec2 latency across region

Figure 7 date from when services are avail in regions

Figure 8 no. of days for service unavailability in a region

Figure 9 vpc environment

Introduction
 

American Airlines is a major US airline having their headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. AMR Corporation, the parent company of American Airlines, merged AA with US Airways in the year 2013 to become the largest airlines globally in terms of revenue-which is over $40Bn as of 2018, destinations served-more than 350 destinations, fleet size-956 mainline flights and scheduled passenger-kilometres flown. AA have 3 different strategic business units: Mainline passenger-operated by the airline’s main operating unit, Regional passenger-operated by regional airline’s operating unit and Cargo segments. Over 6700 flights are operated per day serving more than 350 destinations across 50+ countries. AA has a very large domestic presence which gives the company more than 60% of their revenues and the rest is by international flights and cargo. Passenger business constitutes to the 70% revenue and 87% of this revenue is in the form of airfare.

Existing Cloud Architecture

Earlier American Airlines were always on highlights for its system failures and malfunctions. They started gaining the reputation of not being so technically advance. Thus, American Airlines started assessing cloud providers and decided to move customer site and other applications to cloud.

According to Maya Leibman[1] (Chief Information Officer at AA) said that, “The company aims to revamp portions of the aa.com website so that the customer service and booking site can take advantage of on-demand computing power offered by cloud infrastructure.”

In 2016 American Airline partnered with IBM and started using its VMware HCX solution to deploy legacy systems which include its customer-facing applications to the cloud mainly for booking system and customer service. Researches makes it evident that AA is still facing problems with its IT infrastructure, flight maintenance systems, glitches in reservation systems, website crash and many more applications impacting its reputation & revenue.

Figure 1 Vmware HCX IBM Architecture

Though the company migrated its traditional legacy system to IBM cloud still there are some issues with the existing provider. Firstly, IBM is using third party open-source products to provide PaaS Services. For example, IBM doesn’t have its own serverless feature and is dependent upon Apache OpenWhisk unlike Amazon which had Lambda & EC2 which are closed.

Secondly, IBM have a small community support over social media and Stackoverflow compared to Amazon Web Services.

Thirdly, the global market share of IBM is very small. According to article published by Nodericks Technologies[2], the global market share of AWS cloud is the highest among all the cloud providers.

Figure 2 Cloud Global Market Share

Challenges for American Airlines
 

Infrastructure Issues
 

One of the main reasons for flight cancellations/delays is problem with infrastructure which could be like lack of resources, security issues, performance, etc.
On Thursday (14 June’18) PSA Airlines[3] subsidiary of American Airlines faced huge flight cancellations due to failure in computer systems impacting crew scheduling & tracking systems. Total 700 flights got cancelled on Thursday & Friday. The issue didn’t disappear over weekend and PSA suffered about 1100 flights cancellation by Monday cumulatively. Technical glitches caused American Airlines share to fell <1 percent.

Systems affected:

      Crew Management Systems

      Tracking Systems

Technical Issues
 

In April 2015 when the flight was delayed due to an issue in the Jeppesen app. Jeppesen is a digital flight bag or an app used by pilots to observe the activities occurring on the runway. A duplicate airport runway chart occurred in the app which did not sync with the app’s version. Due to this, the app become unresponsive and the pilots could not see the runway which resulted in flight delays for almost 2 days.

One more incident took place in November 2016 with Sabre, the company which handles the airlines reservation system faced temporary outage in check-in systems. This affected not only American Airlines but also other regional carriers associated with it. The company had its backup systems in place, however these systems are connected to a single micro switch.

In February 2017 in Philadelphia, American Airlines had a planned maintenance power outage between 1 to 4 a.m. Even when the power came back on, the internet access remained down. Due to this the airlines were unable to print boarding passes.

Another issue recently faced by AA on July 2018 was when computer outage halted flight operations for about 30 minutes. The main reason behind this was OS failure and brief connectivity issue with one of its datacentres.

Systems affected:

      Maintenance and Engineering System

      Central Reservation System

      Flight Operation System

      Airport Management System

Possible Solutions

In order to overcome above challenges below solutions can be adopted by American Airlines:

1. Reliable Backup Systems
   In order to provide more redundancy in case of hardware failures, we would require reliable backup systems which can be done using AWS Database services like Glacier, Simple Storage Service(S3). With AWS, we can replicate data across multiple Availability Zones & helps in fault isolation. The AZ’s are connected using high speed links.

2. Business Analytics Service
   American Airline can move towards more data-driven solution. The sensors of aircraft have massive amount of data. This data can be used for advanced aircraft maintenance methods and improving decision making of operational systems.
   With the use of Business Intelligence & data analytics we can not only predict about the condition of various aircraft parts but also it helps in making intelligent decisions about what needs to be done at any given time – such as, to repair or replace parts.

Amazon provides business analytics framework through its AmazonQuickSight service. Through this service we get business insights from data rapidly and it helps in performing advanced analytical functions. It also improves dashboards of airlines performance metrics using data visualization.

3. Disaster Recovery
    

A disaster recover site is very necessary for any organization to keep the business activities running in case of any natural calamities, damage or cyber-attacks. Structuring a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for on-premises infrastructures means creating a secondary physical site which is highly expensive. AWS has partnered with companies such as N2WS, Cloudberry lab, Commvault which deliver effective disaster recovery solutions. CPM also known as Cloud Protection manager which is sold as Amazon Machine Image in the AWS marketplace provides efficient backing up solution at much lower cost.

EBS stores incremental backups, so we only pay for the snapshots that have changed after your recent snapshot. Every snapshot contains the information required to restore the data to a new EBS volume.