Major Airline Alliance Inks Deal With AWS For Cloud Services

Himanshu Khanna

4 weeks ago

Cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced its partnership with world’s first global aviation alliance, Star Alliance. A consortium of 26 airlines including Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada, United Alliance, and others, Star Alliance is moving all of its IT infrastructure to AWS in order to enhance its performance and reduce costs. The airlines’ consortium is working with AWS Partner Network Premier Consulting Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), to migrate its data and applications to AWS. Amid the pandemic, this move to migrate its cloud infrastructure will save Star Alliance 25% of its total cloud cost by replacing its on-premise servers.

Star Alliance, with 26 of its member airlines is going to leverage AWS’ analytical, security, storage, and machine learning capabilities to provide real-time insights to improve global airway traffic control. Data migration from Star Alliance’s on-premise servers to AWS is taking place in stages where specific data and applications were already migrated in February. The rest of the data, including Star Alliance’s baggage tracking application has been migrated from Oracle to Amazon and is based on Amazon Aurora to track bags at airports by creating a centralized reporting system.

AWS’ machine learning and artificial intelligence will also allow Star Alliance to identify future travel trends and demand through multiple AWS services such as Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Quicksight, and Amazon Athena. According to the blog, Star Alliance is also aiming to create a data lake based on Amazon Simple Storage Service to integrate new customer features and enterprise applications.

In a blog regarding the deal, Jeremy Drury, Head of Digital & Technology at Star Alliance, said, “we decided to go all-in on AWS to gain the reliability and scalability we needed to support the increasing number of global travelers joining the alliance each year, but the pandemic also proved how valuable it is to have a flexible and agile infrastructure in the cloud. No one could have predicted what has happened so far in 2020, but because of our collaboration with AWS, we were able to quickly adjust our goals and scale back our expenses.”

Meanwhile, David Peller, Managing Director of Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services, said, “Star Alliance is a prime example of a global organization that has successfully embraced the cloud to steer through times of uncertainty. As the world anticipates opening up again, we are excited to work with Star Alliance as they leverage AWS’s comprehensive suite of services to innovate new offerings at scale while raising the bar for what is possible for the next era of global air travel.”