Lufthansa Technik builds its digital future with Red Hat

Lufthansa Technik, a leading provider of aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services, has moved to a hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat’s enterprise-grade open source technologies running on Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud. Collaborating with Red Hat, Lufthansa Technik created AVIATAR - an open platform helping to enable aviation industry customers to better work together and provide digital offerings designed to improve the overall customer experience. With Red Hat’s Linux container and automation technologies paired with agile DevOps processes, Lufthansa Technik can develop and deploy new applications more quickly and foster integration between internal infrastructure and third-party solutions.

As digital transformation begins to take hold in the enterprise world, the aviation industry faces increasing challenges, from the growing technical capabilities of modern aircraft to evolving, complex customer needs. Recognizing the need for innovation to remain competitive in this changing environment, Lufthansa Technik sought to be at the forefront of digital aviation technologies that could improve customer experience, as well as create new business opportunities.

The company seeks to do so with AVIATAR, a new product division developed from scratch. AVIATAR is an open and collaborative platform for partners, clients and developers that offers a variety of digital products and services by gathering multiple apps in one place. AVIATAR was designed to help make airline operations safer and more reliable, helping to lead to fewer delayed or canceled flights, fewer technical diversions and a smoother travel experience for passengers.

Lufthansa Technik set up a hybrid cloud environment using both Azure and on-premise infrastructure to run AVIATAR's application services. This enables the company to more quickly deploy new components and provide a public cloud option for AVIATAR users. Along with a software stack from Red Hat, Lufthansa Technik is embracing an open and vendor-independent architecture with a vision for a multicloud scenario. Lifthansa Technik’s AVIATAR platform was created using:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the flexible operating system, providing a robust, enterprise-grade Linux platform.
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, running on Azure, designed to support the AVIATAR’s agile, DevOps approach of continuous improvement. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also helps Lufthansa Technik to build, deploy, run and integrate the components of the new infrastructure, including cloud-native applications and microservices.
• Container-native storage by Red Hat based on Red Hat Gluster Storage. Container-native storage provides flexible, scalable, cluster-based software-defined storage optimized for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform designed to more efficiently meet data needs with minimal manual provisioning.
• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) provides the core back-end foundation for applications available to end-users through the AVIATAR platform, and helps accelerate development of enterprise Java applications through standardization and capabilities designed for ease of use.
• Red Hat Data Grid replaces traditional relational databases to more quickly store and retrieve information in-memory, and enable computation and querying on that data at the same time.
• Red Hat JBoss Fuse enables integration of internal and third-party data storage sources.
• Red Hat 3scale API Management gives developers the ability to self-manage its application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Red Hat Ansible Tower helps to create and run reusable infrastructure code and automate provisioning tasks for Azure, Red Hat Gluster Storage and other infrastructure components.

This migration has better enabled Lufthansa Technik to think differently about its digital future. From automation to storage to self-service provisioning, the capabilities provided by Red Hat software help Lufthansa Technik’s development and operations teams work together more effectively. Data scientists, airplane engineers and developers are able to collaborate on internal and third-party applications for material planners, engineers, and other end users, which can help them better predict events and, as a result, help to save time and money.

Lufthansa Technik’s IT and developer teams can now use modern practices and processes, from DevOps and automation to modular and microservices-based infrastructure components to more quickly iterate on new ideas and can now bring applications to market in weeks instead of months or years. Writing new applications can now be done without having to wait for any provisioned infrastructure, which can enable developers to start delivering business value in a few days. Underscoring its success with open source infrastructure, Lufthansa Technik earned a 2018 Red Hat Innovation Award.