Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

OPINION European aerospace giant Airbus has lined up on the runway and is pushing the throttles forward as it prepares to evict apps from America. Airbus has named French cloud services provider Scaleway as the destination for some 900 applications, with an initial 70 getting priority onboarding, as it seeks to put critical …

[KittenHuffer]

Sing it with me .....

It's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming

Software's coming home

It's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming

Software's coming home

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Sing it with me .....

Hopefully for real, in this case.

[aardvarkus]

Palantir probably stole everything already anyway.

[TReko]

Actually, it was a three letter agency. In 2014 it emerged that they stole Airbus IP on behalf of Boeing.

[Strahd Ivarius]

there is no such agency!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing that OpenSource software and LLM models can’t replace.

The Microsoft Office lock-in argument is laughable at this point. People paste RTF into websites more often than share .docx files…

[AVR]

IIRC Airbus does some odd stuff involving absurdly large spreadsheets. Do you, or anyone, have a ready to go substitute (which doesn't involve sneering 'so don't do that!') which a risk-averse corporation would approve of? And whatever other workflow, automation and bespoke software built on Office they may have.

Replacing it all is a huge project as the article points out. I'd think a decent number of medium-to-large size projects rather than doing it all in one go would be the way, but what do I know.

[retiredFool]

Agree, baby steps always a good idea.

Also, I've no idea as not much of a user of spreadsheets, so I'll ask, Microsoft spreadsheets can be larger than LibreOffice? Not completely unbelievable, as the Libre stuff isn't particularly efficient, but the idea that microsoft is efficient is laughable. I recall back in my Frame days, the tech writer refused to use microsoft word as their doc system would become very unstable after around a 1000 pages in a doc. Worse she said, they had no "book" formats where you could bind multiple docs into a single book so that cross references worked across docs. I used Frame for quite awhile myself and found it very good. When Adobe bought Frame and ruined it I switched over to latex for my stuff. A bit cumbersome, but no issues with multi-thousand page books. And latex is ancient, almost a dinosaur. I used it for my thesis in the 1980.

[Anonymous Coward]

Libre Office has its own peculiarities, such as string subsetting functions taking a start position that numbers from 1 on Windows and 0 on Linux. It only takes one glitch like that to completely scramble a large spreadsheet.

[werdsmith]

the tech writer refused to use microsoft word as their doc system would become very unstable after around a 1000 pages in a doc

Word has never been a suitable application for documents on that scale, docs would become flakey with far less pages than that if they contained a lot of images.

[Evil Auditor]

It's in its name. After all, it is neither called Text, nor Document, and definitely not Book.

[Sproggit]

Let's not get carried away - it's a rare case of modesty.

Microsoft didn't even claim "Sentence..."

Kind of feels like there's a rare, deeper truth in there...

[AVR]

Found the article I was remembering: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/11/26/microsoft-habit-proves-hard-to-kick-for-airbus/2224071

Apparently Excel can handle larger sheets than Google workspace can at least.

[TimTheEngineer]

Regarding document tools

I also used Frame for many years and assiduously avoided Word for all the well known reasons. This thread reminded me, however, that Miro$oft is killing off Publisher in October 2026, because apparently nobody publishes things any more and they suggest Word or Powerpoint as alternatives..

[James Hughes 1]

Typst is a modern alternative to Latex - we use it here for all sorts of docs (internal and external), and it works very well indeed generating PDF and/or HTML from easy to read markup.

[Doctor Syntax]

If a spreadsheet is absurdly large it's the wrong application. Take it (cautiously) as a prototype and build a real application to replace it.

[Sproggit]

I think you might be over-stating slightly by framing your point as the decision resting with a spreadsheet as the application. I'd say that the application is a mix of business logic and presentation layer - and that what matters is the data structure you're using for the actual processing you need to perform.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this... but there was a point a while back - region of maybe 10-15 year - where Microsoft starting telling their folk that they would be officially dropping Access from Office and instead migrating all the functionality to Excel. Working for a huge multinational I got access to all sorts of early release stuff and some of their strategy documents and the messaging that came with the comment suggested that they had been doing some user surveys and concluded that most large-scale clients - big corporates - were using Excel to crunch data as much if not more than numbers.

They literally fell back on "fields will be columns; records will be rows" ...

I can't tell you what ever became of that idea - sorry, though perhaps another reader can fill in the blanks - but really my point here was to observe that the real power or limitation from Excel [or any other app for that matter] tends to start and end with the definition of the data structures it uses. And yes, I'm aware that this likely contradicts any premise of user-centric design, but there's correlation between intuitiveness on the front end and the cleanliness of the data architecture on the back end. Get the latter wrong and you're screwed on the former before you've even started.

[Derezed]

Excel is not a data modelling tool. Excel is a single user application with many, many flaws. Extremely useful tool by itself, anything shared or team based is an abomination. I build data models to serve excel users…as soon as Excel IS the model, you’re screwed.

The users are now shifting to using Power BI for their point data modelling… work to unwind and structure that should keep me busy until I die.

User tools != corporate data models. If they do, you’re doing systems and data wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed - but welcome to the world where all corporates are doing systems and data wrong (at the very least somewhere, for something).

[DrXym]

I'd agree but at the same time I could see some sales/engineering department of Airbus having some stupidly complicated spreadsheet that takes a raft of inputs to visualize something and the thing has grown organically over many years sprouting arms and legs, and nobody has the time or desire to replace it.

[cookiecutter]

nothing that can't be fixed. how many officers are out there just because someone has said "this will take a decade!", "this is too hard" & a decade later they are still whinging "this will take a decade to do"

[DrXym]

I doubt Airbus is any different from anywhere else - someone will ask why spend a large amount of money to rewrite something that already works and that will be the end of the discussion. It will only be if the CTO orders every department to identify all of their processes that involve spreadsheets and then goes through each of those with a critical eye. Even then most of them would probably be left the way they are.

[Valheru]

In Aerospace where I work, we rarely use excel or spreadsheets to exchange data outside the company with suppliers or customers. CSV, custom file types, and mandated Aero data formats are most common. For compliance, we often write or buy custom software. For internal use, spreadsheets are all over the place from simple lists to very large, complex project tracking registers.

[anonymous boring coward]

You are doing it right. Never use proprietary formats if you can avoid it. Internal throwaway tools and solutions, fine. But don’t build your company on it. Nor your civil service.

[DrXym]

Assuming they do it does not hurt to try the alternatives and see if they function as expected or not. And if they don't, then they could put a bug bounty on it.

AFAIK, Excel and (LibreOffice) Calc have virtually identical maximum limits in terms of rows, cols, sheets. Chances are that either would die a death before you ever got close to testing those limits. The biggest danger of taking a spreadsheet over are things like VBA, undefined behaviour, power queries/pivots, rendering of graphs and some missing functions.

[FIA]

There is nothing that OpenSource software and LLM models can’t replace.

There is, it's called "Excel".

In IT we tend not to encounter it much as we write actual apps... but that for most medium to large companies would be the blocker I expect.

[Anonymous Coward]

The software is way bigger than any MS office stuff.

Looking here are ERP, so payroll, accounting, manufacturing, engineering. Big systems that that have to be audited, not the stuff an LLM can just pull out its IO port overnight.

Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one of the on premise ERp systems hosted in AWS (as opposed to

Native cloud provisioned) in the frame somewhere if it’s on AWS. The sort of systems that take 2 or 3 years to fully migrate off

These sort of systems end up being vetted as suitable when tendering for big contracts to ensure they can sustain long term supply chains.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're running Windows

or indeed any proprietary OS, then sovereignty is an illusion.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: If you're running Windows

You have to start somewhere. If Windows is aiding in exfiltrating your corporate data, then that’s a massive lawsuit and humongous backlash waiting to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

They will do some token migrations but reality is that this isn't going to happen based on culture I've seen at Airbus never mind all the work they do for DoD, US based manufacturing who will insist on US hosting.

[asgalon]

The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

It is everywhere, and as far as I know the vendor lock-in seems to work perfectly because of the proprietary formats used for interchange of data between companies and authorities in a broad range of applications. Let the mad king lock down AutoCad cloud access for "national security" reasons just for a single day...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

In the high end cad apace Airbus run Catia or there is Solidworks also built by Dasaault

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Someone must use autocad because it's still around, but after using it at university on part of my Mech Eng degree course in the mid 1990's, I have never seen it in use at an engineering business since....

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Auticad is big in civil and building construction but it's not the giant it was

[asgalon]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Well, it is not my field of expertise, so my sources were perhaps partly a bit outdated, partly generalized their experience a bit too much, and partly my impression was wrong. Interesting to get some more realistic views here.

[the Jim bloke]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Government utilities where I am require data to be submitted in official AutoCAD formats, output by licensed AutoCAD.

So all the work is done in something more functional and less user-hostile, then imported into the one licensed AutoCAD machine in the company, then exported from there.

Essentially the same as paying off a protection racket, or union, or all the other extortion rackets through history...

[thames]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Serious mechanical engineering shifted over from "drafting board on a computer screen" style drafting software such as Autocad to 3D modelling software such as CATIA and Solidworks a couple of decades ago. If I recall correctly, the people who pioneered this were Airbus and Dassault, because aircraft designs were getting too complex to keep dong things the old way.

The auto industry followed, for pretty much the same reasons.

From what I understand, AutoCAD is mainly used these days for architectural work, and it's used there mainly for reasons of compatibility with other software that works in conjunction with it.

I used to use AutoCAD a lot for electrical CAD work. It wasn't really the right tool for the job, it was used simply for compatibility with other people in the same line of work, who were also using it for the same reason. All the mechanical people I had worked with though had shifted over from AutoCAD to CATIA or Solidworks because for them the increased capabilities of that software were worth the effort of changing over. I would happily have binned AutoCAD and the associated expense, but any solution that I adopted would not have been compatible with people in other companies that I had to exchange drawings with, plus I had to maintain and update drawings for stuff we had already built previously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Not only did the automakers adopt CATIA, they were able to poach a number of experienced [and disgruntled] drafters and engineers from Boeing. I recall how happy people were that so many new employment options opened up with that industry shift.

[RichardBarrell]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

Interesting, thank you. I didn't know that both of those were from France.

[Pobthe]

Re: The most obvious single point of failure of european industry is AutoCAD.

AutoCad??? These are serious people they run Dassault CATIA although IBM have very deep hooks into it. Siemens NX is also very widely used.

All legacy companies run cobbled together environments. They are all held together with proprietary software and excel. This is why I laugh a little at the ai sales pitch. It's the work of a decade before it gets adopted in these companies at any great scale. They can barely keep a printer running.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cloud is bad, don’t take the Cloud people!!!

I've heard, over pints of proper British ale in a pub in the City certain very visible financial institutions started being pushed HARD by the French regulators last summer to move critical workloads onto French-only Cloud providers, devoid of any US (or UK/China) access.

A bit different than the German and Saudia laws but striking nonetheless that trust in the leadership & vendors from Gilead is waning rightly in international markets!

[Taliesinawen]

Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon

> Even if the supply chain is managed through a lovely EU-hosted portal, all the supplier data will also live on those suppliers' systems.

Palantir Technologies Extends Strategic Collaboration with Airbus Through Multi-Year Agreement

[UK Jim]

1980s joke...

"Besides, would you even want your aircraft running code by Claude?" reminds me of this 1980s joke:-

A Microsoft employee and a DEC employee are sitting in a plane on the ground.

They start to discuss the introduction of embedded software to fly planes.

DEC employee: I certainly wouldn't want to be on a plane that was relying on our software.

Microsoft employee: I'd have no problem at all with one using ours.

DEC employee: Really?

Microsoft employee: Sure, it'd be completely safe, as it'd never run long enough for the plane to leave the gate, so we'd be perfectly safe!

[Evil Auditor]

Re: 1980s joke...

«..would you even want your aircraft running code by Claude?»

I wouldn't even want the clock display on my phone running code by Claude. I want it reliable, any time, all time.

[TReko]

Re: 1980s joke...

The Boeing 737MAX FCAS software that caused the crashes was outsourced to developers paid $9 an hour in Bangalore.

https://medium.com/@suttojusrikanthchary66/the-high-cost-of-cheap-labor-how-9-hour-engineers-cost-boeing-billions-b20f42e48dd4

[Qwerty44]

Re: 1980s joke...

I saw the Netflix doc about this and I'd say it is not jist the agency's fault but also Boeing's. They used ONE only one sensor to check the airplain's speed and position and when that got frozen, then the issue become a disaster. So they put the new owerpowered engine to the old budy and then this throthle check system with one sensor. Sensor got frozen and the system thought it is owerpowering the body and then pushed the front down until deep dived. Pilots had 30sec to act and Beoing also did not trained and did not sent any news about how to operate the Aircraft with this new automated crap system.

My hobby cluster at home, has at least two of all resources, so how is an Aircraft had only one?

This is not a joke, this is serious design trouble and should be in prison whoever allowed this to happen.

But I guess the new system's will be done by AI, so must be "much-much" better!

[Valheru]

Re: 1980s joke...

The CMC (Central Maintenance Computer) on many commercial airliners runs Windows. It mostly checks patch and version compatibility. It does not actually execute any flight controls.

[kvuj]

> Thing is, Airbus doesn't want in. It has a six-pronged AI strategy, but none of those prongs involve agents or code generation or line-of-business automation. Knowledge extraction, support chatbots, decision support, flight automation – all things that can be built and deployed on-prem. Besides, would you even want your aircraft running code by Claude?

For real? Airbus is using AI for Decision support and flight automation?

That's kinda horrifying...

[Doctor Syntax]

From TFA: "there's no organisation that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement. Nobody's done that before"

If it hasn't been done before there can't be one to replace so no problem.

[graemep]

The problem there is a spec that is basically "it has to be exactly the same" rather than "it has to deliver this functionality".

[Doctor Syntax]

When policy becomes "It absolutely cannot be the same" things change.

[Scotech]

Amazing though, how often "it absolutely cannot be the same" becomes "it must deliver this functionality" through the discovery phase, and then morphs into "it must be exactly the same" throughout implementation and testing phases.

[Acrimonius]

How will this be paid for?

Nobody mentions when a company embarks on a unbudgetted overhaul of its complex integrated IT how will it be paid for and how in the meantime productivity will take a dive. One source is EU and Airbus can now simply add the mark-up to the price and extend the schedule under the guise of sovereignty - for the greater good.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: How will this be paid for?

I think you underestimate the inventiveness, resolve and ability of Airbus and other large high tech corporations.

Also, it’s not as if they get the US-centric services for free at the moment. Money is available.

[Dave@Home]

Re: How will this be paid for?

Do the EU buy a lot of airplanes?

[the Jim bloke]

Airbus have a huge reputation advantage

.. as long as they dont follow Boeings example

[david 12]

"Those in other countries"

Those in other countries, distrusting their government and fearful of persecution, will be welcome to enjoy the protection and liberties that European digital sovereignty can provide.

Those in other countries using EU or UK providers will get exactly the same protection as they get using US providers. None.

EU and UK providers are subject to exactly the same kind of government carve-outs for 'security' and spying and policing that American providers are subject to.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: "Those in other countries"

I doubt that very much. EU doesn’t serve the agenda of any particular EU member state. EU would never sanction stealing of corporate data to help, what, EU? EU has no corporations, unlike USA. EU consist of sovereign nations.

[MazeFrame]

CERN took the step

> Yes, yes, of course there's Linux and LibreOffice and all that, but there's no organization that can respond to a competitive tender request for a tightly specified Office/Workspace replacement

CERN has some slide decks and tutorials online from their big migration away from Micro$lop. Not sure how applicable that is to Airbus usecase, there are paths to freedom to be tried though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: CERN took the step

There are more an more administrations and local councils moving out of MS, so examples are numerous.

The guy writing the article must be an US intern...

[Caprica]

Couldn't AWS sovereignty cloud in Germany meet those demands, given possible compromises?

I've been following up sovereignty cloud from AWS launch and given EU only personal , devices and no connection to US/commercial partition be enough? This should be similar to China regions on this partition. Other elements such as using US make software and chips are probably not replaceable at this time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Couldn't AWS sovereignty cloud in Germany meet those demands, given possible compromises?

The whole patriot act stuff is a little murky. Whilst they claim independence the US at the same time

claim they are still a US company and are not allowed to say if they have to give NSA access or even if an access request was made.

I would suspect that still have offshore teams for software support then have firewalls setup between internal AWS divisions.

[dontmindme]

Re: Couldn't AWS sovereignty cloud in Germany meet those demands, given possible compromises?

WRONG - the sovereign cloud is legally under control of EU country laws. The NSA can ask but they would have to compel a country like Germany. AWS designed it that way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Couldn't AWS sovereignty cloud in Germany meet those demands, given possible compromises?

Yes, you are correct. There is no path for the NSA or FBI except through EU and/or German law frameworks. The US Govt. can demand AWS produce the goods, but if AWS is not in control of the mechanism to extract the data, they are out of the legal liability of the US Govt.

[Evaluator]

Airbus is reinforcing the emergent pattern of large orgs doing migrations to public cloud, then optimizing for cost by re-migrating after the first migration got everything ship shape for cloud. It should be clear that the first migration is really, really hard but after that, it gets a lot easier. After hundreds of cloud migrations, I'd point out that converting apps to "cloud native" only happens if its your internal line of business app. No ISV will sell you the microservices version of their app so don't waste time dreaming about it. The only use of microservices apps, in general, is by SaaS based ISV's - subscription only.

[dontmindme]

Thanks MAGA

Thanks MAGA!! Your idiocy is confirmed. MAGA will be known in world history as the Sucker Class. Dumb people who drank the koolaid and huffed the fumes put out by the GOP and Trump . Only to see American technical hegemony slide under the table like a piece of slippery cheesecake, then quickly plucked from the air with Bruce Lee like super hand speed and eaten up by Chinese industry.

[TiredNConfused80]

What about mobiles?

Legitimate question. If they're accessing anything from their mobiles what are they using? The only 2 options really are Apple or Android? Or is there a mandate that no company files / systems etc are accessed via mobile device