CASE STUDY
L
ufthansa Technik, an independent
provider of airline maintenance, repair
and overhaul (MRO) services, sought
to create a digital platform for the aviation
industry, AVIATAR. To support its development
and operation, the company created a hybrid
cloud infrastructure based on enterprise
open source software from Red Hat. The
AVIATAR team can now use agile DevOps
approaches, automation, internal and third-
party integration, and self-service capabilities
to quickly iterate based on data and feedback.
As a result, Lufthansa Technik provides an
innovative digital platform that helps the
world’s airlines optimise their operations.
Improving airline technical operations
Expectations in the airline industry are
incredibly high, making delays and
cancellations costly. Predictive analytics
is key to avoiding service interruptions by
helping airlines use data to better organise
and schedule maintenance events. To create
a solution to these industry challenges, the
company’s application development and UX
teams began a collaborative project with data
scientists, airplane engineers and other experts.
AVIATAR would support digital products
for material planners, engineers and other
end-users in development and operations
– helping them better predict events and
as a result, save time and money. To create
and support AVIATAR, the Lufthansa
Technik team needed a flexible, scalable
environment that could run multiple
applications using a shared repository of
industry data, such as aircraft sensor data, as
well as operational data, such as flight plans
and delay information. The team also
sought to gradually move from on-premise
to cloud infrastructure.
“Keeping our customers’ data stored
separately from the Lufthansa
infrastructure is key to remaining open
and neutral,” said Tobias Mohr, Head of
Technology and Infrastructure for AVIATAR
at Lufthansa Technik. The team also
decided to shift to an agile, DevOps work
approach. “We wanted to deliver new
features several times a day, generating
feedback very quickly,” said Mohr.
Building a cloud platform with
open source
Lufthansa Technik sought to use open
source technology and shift to a hybrid
WE WANT TO
BE THE OPEN
MARKET PLAYER,
NOT THE
PROPRIETARY
ONE. WE WANT
TO HELP
THE INDUSTRY.
cloud approach to support the creation
and operation of AVIATAR. “There are lots
of similarities between the open approach
of AVIATAR and the open source model.
We want to be the open market player, not
the proprietary one. We want to help the
industry. That goal is very similar to what the
open source movement wants to achieve,”
said Johannes Hansen, Senior Director of
Application Development/UX for AVIATAR at
Lufthansa Technik.
The team decided to deploy enterprise open
source software from Red Hat, including:
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux to create a
robust, enterprise-grade Linux and
container technology foundation
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform,
running on Microsoft Azure, to support
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