Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Air Canada’s journey with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) (CON101)

Summary

Air Canada modernized its Enterprise Messaging Platform (EMP) using Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).
Dustin Scott from Red Hat and Air Canada's Wender and Bharath shared insights into the modernization journey.
Air Canada's IT culture focuses on safety, reliability, and customer experience, driving the need for modernization.
The modernization involved moving away from mainframe and physical servers to a cloud-based, containerized solution with ROSA.
Key requirements for the new platform included high availability, scalability, performance, security, and observability.
ROSA provided a managed application platform, reducing operational overhead and allowing Air Canada to focus on applications serving customers.
The transition to ROSA enabled Air Canada to handle more message traffic, achieve high availability, reduce operational expenses, and integrate with CI/CD pipelines.
Air Canada plans to continue containerizing and migrating applications to ROSA, making it their standard container solution.

Air Canada's decision to modernize its EMP was driven by the need for improved scalability, cost efficiency, and operational agility.
The airline industry's dynamic nature, with factors like weather and geopolitical events, necessitates a robust and flexible IT infrastructure.
ROSA was chosen for its ability to integrate with existing AWS services, support for containerization, and managed services reducing the need for in-house management of the platform.
The use of Terraform for infrastructure as code and the integration of GitOps and DevOps practices were critical in improving deployment times and developer-led operations.
The collaboration between AWS and Red Hat provided Air Canada with continuous support and expertise, highlighting the importance of strong vendor partnerships in successful IT modernization projects.
Air Canada's future plans indicate a trend towards containerization and cloud-native architectures, which are becoming standard practices for enterprise IT modernization.