CASE STUDY
T
o improve its passenger experience
and become the best digital airport,
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to
migrate several of its IT systems to the cloud
to become more flexible, secure and efficient.
The airport chose to deploy Red Hat OpenShift
as the foundation for its hybrid cloud
environment, supported by Red Hat Gluster
Storage, Red Hat JBoss Middleware and other
Red Hat products to accelerate development
and deployment and improve application
programming interface (API) management. Supporting critical IT services
With help from Red Hat Consulting, the
airport deployed OpenShift Dedicated in just
10 days. The new environment supports the
airport’s vision of agile, self-service processes
and vendor flexibility that help its IT teams
quickly and efficiently develop and deploy
new customer-facing services. “Services such as our Flight API have a lot of
connections to the outside world. It provides
information for gate, terminal and check-
in time to passengers that is also shared
with our partners,” said Mechiel Aalbers,
Senior Technical Application Coordinator at
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, one of
Europe’s busiest airports, has set a goal
to become the leading digital airport
by 2019. This goal includes providing
seamless journeys for passengers – for
example, by minimising the time spent on
the travel booking process – improving the
cost-efficiency of its operations and using
the latest technology to collaborate with
airlines and other stakeholders.
To support its goal of being the leading
digital airport, Schiphol needed a new
approach to IT. The airport reviewed its
main IT services and decided to migrate
some services from its Central Information
System Schiphol (CISS) solution to a modern
infrastructure. This new infrastructure needed
to provide massive scalability to support one
of the key tenets of the airport’s goal: sharing
relevant data via RESTful APIs based on open
data principles.
“We foresaw a risk in having our open Flight
API running on our critical infrastructure,”
said Aalbers. “We were unable to get
enough scalability from our existing on-
premise infrastructure, so we wanted to see
how an enterprise cloud could help.”
Deploying innovative platform
solutions from a trusted vendor
To find a reliable open source cloud platform,
Schiphol turned to a trusted vendor: Red
Hat. The airport had already been using Red
Hat JBoss Fuse to integrate its on-premise
infrastructure with its Airport Service Bus
platform, as well as Red Hat 3scale API
Management Platform to manage its
application programming interfaces (APIs).
In addition, the airport chose to deploy Red
Hat OpenShift Container Platform due to its
compatibility and integration with Docker
and Google Kubernetes.
“We looked at Docker and Kubernetes for
the new platform and we saw that Red Hat
www.intelligentcio.com
OpenShift Container Platform provided the
best mix of these,” said Aalbers.
In addition, OpenShift Container Platform
offers access to Red Hat’s industry-leading
services. “At Schiphol, we first and foremost
look for open source software, backed by
support. These requirements put Red Hat
front and centre in our search process,” said
Aalbers. “We could have selected the open
source community version, but we would
like to have support, so we chose Red Hat’s
version. The airport also deployed several
other Red Hat products, including:
• Red Hat Gluster Storage, an offering
integrated with OpenShift Container
Platform that simplifies persistent storage
• Red Hat Satellite, a system management
tool that provides easier management
WITH 3SCALE API
MANAGEMENT
PLATFORM, THE
LEARNING CURVE
IS SMALL AND
YOU CAN DEPLOY
APIS VERY
QUICKLY.
and updating of Red Hat technology
• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application
Platform, Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red
Hat 3scale API
• Management Platform to support
flexible API development and
management and integrate on premise
and cloud environments
Schiphol also chose the community version
of Ansible playbooks for Infrastructure
as Code (IaC) provisioning, the process
of managing physical infrastructure
resources through files rather than hardware
configurations or tools.
To quickly deploy OpenShift to meet an
internal deadline, the airport chose to run
Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, a single-
INTELLIGENTCIO
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