Schipol sets sights on digital success

 Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Europe’s third largest airport, is using Red Hat solutions to expand the range of services it offers passengers, supporting its goal of becoming the world’s best digital airport. With help from Red Hat, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is creating a self-service, multi-cloud platform for its internal IT team and its business partners, slashing development time as it creates new services for travelers.

Servicing more than 63.6 million passengers and processing more than 1.7 million tons of cargo last year, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is Europe's third largest airport in terms of passenger number and cargo volume. The 100 year-old airport aims to continue its position as a top airport in Europe and to do so, the airport set forth its bold ambition to become the world’s best digital airport by 2018. To create a great passenger experience with technology, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol has focused on creating digitally-minded culture, introducing a range of new technologies and digital services - all aimed at simplifying and improving the passenger journey and the airport’s operations.

As part of this effort, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol reviewed its IT services strategy, and wanted a scalable application platform to accelerate the development and deployment of its new digital services across its hybrid environment. They required a cloud-agnostic, open platform that could not only enable application portability, offering Amsterdam Airport Schiphol greater flexibility and the ability to avoid lock-in on a cloud platform, and which could also integrate with partner services through APIs.

After a detailed review of competitive solutions, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol chose Red Hat to support its needs for a modern and agile platform aligned with its technology vision, including new cloud-native applications and digital services based on open APIs.

Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is creating a hybrid, multi-cloud development platform based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployed across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its on-premise virtualized environment. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from Linux containers, Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, enabling mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

Using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform across its multi-cloud environment, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol can also meet its high availability and scalability challenges during its busiest times, including holidays. And, with the highly scalable, container-native storage solution provided by Red Hat Gluster Storage integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol was able to manage the complexities of persistent storage.

Key to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol’s digital strategy are the services it delivers via APIs, including its Flight API, which provides information for passengers such as gate, terminal and check-in time. The APIs are also shared with its partners for enhanced passenger services. The airport had already been using Red Hat JBoss Fuse for its on-premise infrastructure as the airport's main service bus. Now, it has connected this on-premise service to JBoss Fuse integration services running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to exchange data between its main systems and APIs running in the cloud. With JBoss Fuse-based API services in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat 3scale API Management, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol reports that it can create new APIs 50 percent faster.