Delta Airlines takes flight with Amazon Web Services

Delta Airlines celebrated Amazon Prime Day this week by charting a course for AWS, naming the cloud giant as its preferred cloud provider. The multi-year agreement will see Delta, one of the largest domestic airlines in the US, modernize and migrate its workloads to AWS, with an emphasis on mining its wells of data to drive …

[An_Old_Dog]

Another Misapplication of Cloud Tech

I can't see how this could be cheaper than doing things with Delta's own, in-house computers. Their workloads aren't fluctuating that much, they won't need to suddenly scale up to a gazillion processors, and all that analytics could be done on their in-house computers. Further, they'll have more external dependencies, and if things go wrong at Amazon, Delta is (and/or their customers are) hosed, and there's nothing the Delta techs can do about it.

But hey, the Board of Directors can brag to their cronies that Delta's computer systems are buzzword-compliant.

[aussie-alan]

And their mainframe systems?

I wonder what they're going to do with their core "Deltamatic" system? I suspect it's still running on mainframe (IBM z/TPF), and handles schedules / reservations / tickets / departure control. Similarly, for America, they're using the cloud but the heart of their system is Sabre (again, running on z/TPF)

A.

[MachDiamond]

Outsourcing the core of the business

If a company can outsource a core and ongoing function of its business to some other company that will need to duplicate the infrastructure and personnel and collect a profit, they must have been doing it wrong. Delta would be a big enough customer that they might have a chance to get some response in the event of an outage, they also might not since every other AWS customer that's just as large might be demanding answers at the same time. It turns into a problem that Delta can't even through money at to get resolved as quickly as possible.

I see this as a huge risk for Delta. The cost savings can be entirely wiped out in what might be one day or even a few hours of not being able to operate. It will also not give Delta as much flexibility to develop a better system. They won't have the talent on hand anymore.