back to article American Airlines decides to cruise into Azure's cloud

American Airlines named Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform this week in a deal it says will cut costs, boost efficiency, and support its eco-sustainability goals. The multi-year partnership will see American migrate its data warehousing and legacy applications to a single operations hub on Azure. The airline touts …

  1. Is it turned on?

    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.

    1. Dwarf

      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.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Storm clouds

      The takeaway shouldn't be that any particular cloud provider is garbage.

      The takeaway should be that ALL CLOUD PROVIDERS ARE GARBAGE.

      Any company big enough to have a single full-time IT person on staff is too big to rely on "the cloud" aka somebody else's computer for a single business-critical operation. An airline is, without question, big enough to have round the clock IT staff and their own data centers in multiple locations around the world. They should NEVER put anything in 'the cloud'.

      It's idiotic.

      1. JohnnyReb

        Re: Storm clouds

        You really should go read up on basic economics and fixed/variable costs. Luddites like you are the reason companies go bust very quickly/avoidably

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    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) ?

    1. WhereAmI?

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wait a minute

        Can confirm.

        Also, when a bag tag is issued, the airline's computer system in their datacentre allocates the number on the tag to the flights it needs to go on, and they then have to send a message to the airport with the tag number and flight information on it. These messages often pass through one or more intermediary message providers before they're consumed and processed by the baggage handling system running in the airport.

        The systems don't even have to be "down" to cause problems - if there's a delay in processing messages for any reason, that can be enough to have your bag dumped down the manual sortation chute, if the baggage handling system hasn't received and processed the message before it has to decide what to do with it. The worst kind of problem to deal with is a system running into performance issues where the backlog of messages builds up just enough that every single bag ends up down the manual chute - and invariably at some point you're going to have to stop/flush/restart to fix that kind of problem, and every minute it's down, there's a load more bags needing to be manually sorted.

        Being dragged out of slumber by the on-call phone going at 4am because *every single bag* at <redacted near London> airport is going down the manual chute to figure out why and fix it ASAFP isn't a good way to be woken up, and thankfully isn't something I have to worry about any more.

        1. aussie-alan

          Re: Wait a minute

          The messaging between the Passenger Services System (PSS) and the airports still relies on 60s and 70s technology. Terse little teletype messages, such as a BSM (Baggage Sortation Message), that traverse specialized and expensive 3rd-party networks (i.e. SITA). Really good back in the days when we had 4800 baud links to remote airports...

          1. yoganmahew

            Re: Wait a minute

            Most links these days are point-to-point over at least matip, so cheap as chips (considering the small bandwdth requirements).

            The application layer is still tty format, as you say, some of which dates from the fifties... (pre-automation). That it has survived this long tells you a lot about its reliability, flexibility, and fault tolerance as a standard.

  3. aussie-alan

    This doesn't cover their real core system...

    What's not mentioned here is that all of American's bookings and tickets flow through Sabre. The core is a mainframe z/TPF system, mostly written in assembler. It's not in Azure and never will be...

    I haven't kept up with how it's managed these days, in the late 90s American spun it all out into Sabre with an IPO that gave $600m or so of their debt back to shareholders. Sabre then sold their datacenter to EDS in about 2000, which passed to HP and then a few others. AA set about writing their own reservations system to replace Sabre and failed miserably (aka JetStream, around 2010).

    Sabre is busily rewriting their core systems and move them to Google's cloud. It will be interesting to see how this interacts with AA, as the relationship between the two companies has been strained for the last 20 years or so...

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