American Airlines decides to cruise into Azure's cloud
- Reference: 1652962508
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/19/american_airlines_azure/
- Source link:
The multi-year partnership will see American migrate its data warehousing and legacy applications to a single operations hub on Azure.
The airline touts the partnership as an opportunity to use data and analytics to improve operations. American believes this will allow it to speed up bag tracking, enable preemptive rerouting based on weather conditions, and simulate larger changes using digital twins.
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The collaboration builds on a longstanding relationship between Microsoft and the US airline. Previously, American tapped the Redmond goliath to develop an extension to Microsoft Teams it calls ConnectMe. The mobile application eliminates the need for support staff, who are rarely tied to a desk, to access applications at fixed desktops or laptops.
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The airline claims the application has already helped accelerate airplane turnaround times at gates, something vital for profitability.
[4]Azure services fall over in Europe, Microsoft works on fix
[5]Microsoft revises software licensing, cloud policies amid EU regulator scrutiny
[6]Arm, Microsoft at pains to say this CPU arch can be trusted with real server work
[7]Microsoft closes Windows LSA hole under active attack
And this spring, American deployed an “intelligent” gating program, built on Azure, at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport that it says eliminates the need for manual gate planning. The program analyzes multiple data points for every landing and departure and automatically assigns aircraft to the nearest gate.
American plans to roll out the gating program its other hub airports later this year in support of its sustainability targets. The airline aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 by embracing sustainable business practices, and fielding more efficient aircraft and fuels.
While American plans to migrate a wide array of workloads to Azure over the next few years, the biz is taking steps to mitigate potential disruptions to its critical services.
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Microsoft Azure generally aims for [9]99.99 percent uptime , though the cloud provider has occasionally experienced turbulence. About a year ago, Azure Active Directory (AAD) experienced an extended outage after a cryptographic key was mistakenly removed.
“We work with all of our technology partners to ensure reliability of applications and have contingency plans in place for our critical applications associated with our operations,” an American Airlines spokesperson told The Register .
So at least according to American, your flight shouldn’t be delayed the next time Azure takes a nose dive. Yeah, and pigs might fly. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/20/microsoft_azure_outage/
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[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/24/microsoft_outage_mode/
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Storm clouds
That's why all the cloud vendors in their well architected framework papers always have the a reliability engineering section with statements like "embrace failure"
Nothing is ever 100% resilient on its own, so either scale out to other systems outside the worst case blast radius and accept that there will be times when eventual consistency will happen.
The only thing we rely on is the cloud vendors to eat their own dog food and make sure that their own systems meet the well architected frameworks that the publish too.
Wait a minute
" speed up bag tracking, enable preemptive rerouting based on weather conditions "
Isn't that stuff they're already doing now ? With computers ? What exactly is the improvement AA is expecting after having spect weeks, if not months, handing their current system over to the single-point-of-failure platform that is Azure ?
And when Azure is down, will that mean that pre-emptive routing will not work, or will AA keep the existing system as an emergency backup (yeah, as if that would happen) ?
Re: Wait a minute
The real bottleneck when it all goes titsup is the baggage belts. All of a sudden everything comes down the one belt and has to be manually sorted onto the correct belts for the required flights. You don't ever, ever, ever want to see a computer outage when everything, including flights, goes to manual fallback. It's a chaotic shitstorm like you wouldn't believe.
I know. I worked back of house for a year at (redacted) airport and it happened three times during that period. I was totally fckd by the time I got home.
Storm clouds
Lets face it, so far this year all of the big cloud providers have issues of one type or another, its not unique to Azure.