Matt Sinsera, senior vice president of software engineering at Delta Air Lines, said he was very pleased with the company’s choice of hybrid infrastructure. The cloud domain is a way to cooperate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the mainframe system with Kyndryl. “We have found a good balance. Cloud and mainframe go hand in hand. Hundreds of applications are moving to the cloud, but most of our core capabilities are based on mainframe workloads. Mainframes will certainly be with us for some time.
Workloads on the mainframe include a travel reservation system and a crew scheduling system. They are essential to air operations. It’s a critical application that doesn’t shut down 24 hours a day, Shinsera said.
According to Syncera, Delta Air Lines started using the cloud in earnest two years ago when travel was all but halted due to the pandemic. Around this time, Delta Air Lines partnered with AWS to begin moving many of its decentralized and front-end applications to the cloud. Meanwhile, traditional back-end workloads were kept on the mainframe.
One of the cloud apps Delta is pushing is its WiFi portal. Satellite-provided in-flight wireless internet is expensive and usually has limited hours of use. But thanks to a robust Wi-Fi portal introduced this year, Delta Air Lines passengers can use in-flight Wi-Fi throughout the flight at no additional cost.
The Wi-Fi portal is provided through a partnership with T-Mobile. Passengers can use this app to enjoy whatever content they want on their device instead of the in-flight content presented on the screen behind the seat. Syncera said the Wi-Fi Portal has been deployed on about 500 of Delta’s 902 flagship aircraft and 352 regional aircraft, thanks to Delta’s aggressive cloud investments.
“From concept to installation and commissioning, it was all done in six months,” Shinsera said. As a result, Delta Air Lines was able to run applications efficiently and flexibly in the cloud, while reducing equipment purchase and maintenance costs.
Get the best of both worlds
Delta Air Lines is moving a number of analytical and data workloads to the cloud as part of its cloud strategy. It also aims to improve customer service and experience. For example, Delta’s IT team of approximately 4,000 people, including contractors, has implemented omnichannel customer service with automated services such as chat and virtual assistance. In this process, we used Amazon Connect. These automated services process basic customer requests, such as baggage allowances for scheduled trips, and “process them faster by linking them to automated workflows.”
Delta Air Lines plans to introduce AI to its website to further automate customer interactions. “Understanding the customer’s intent and automating the process accordingly, especially in very demanding transactions, is one of the most difficult tasks,” says Shinsera. We are focusing our efforts on automating this task.
In addition to this enthusiasm for the cloud, Delta Air Lines will continue to rely on mainframes for certain workloads. Therefore, he recently re-signed a five-year partnership with Kindril. Kindrille, the successor to IBM Global Services, will manage mainframe applications such as reservations and crew scheduling workloads, as well as Delta’s CRM system and FAA maintenance documents.
According to Brian O’Rourke, who joined IBM Canada after 20 years at Delta Air Lines and is now a Senior Advisor for Delta Air Lines at Kindrrill, Kindrille incorporates automation capabilities to provide greater agility in moving and managing data in multiple environments. Do O’Rourke said Kindrrill will help Delta Air Lines deliver innovative services by revamping existing infrastructure to increase data utilization, and expects both infrastructure platforms, cloud and mainframe , coexist for a long time.
“The modernization and migration of applications to the cloud continues,” O’Rourke said. However, we say that some of the applications critical to airline operations will remain on the mainframe for some time to come.
Some analysts predict that this hybrid cloud and mainframe infrastructure will continue to be used in complex industries such as aviation and banking, where high availability and maximum reliability are absolutely necessary. Additionally, some analysts note that a hybrid approach allows companies to avoid the cost of locking in with one vendor and switching to another while benefiting from multiple layers of outage protection.
Mainframe life
Some CIOs are attempting a mainframe exit strategy by opting for a rapid transition to the cloud, while others believe the mainframe is in decline, said Peter Ruten, research director for high-performance computing at IDC. But mainframes remain the ideal choice for handling specific workloads, he added, leaving many CIOs wondering which option to choose.
“A rather paradoxical situation is unfolding,” Luten said. CIOs generally belong to the untrained generation on mainframes. You are in the situation of overseeing a mainframe system managed by a team older than you that absorbs a large part of your budget that you do not understand. So the CIO’s knee-jerk response is, “Let’s put it in the cloud.” But maintenance teams often respond that it’s expensive, disruptive and, frankly, unnecessary.
Ruten went on to note that today’s mainframes are different from those of the past. He emphasized, “This is a state-of-the-art system built with a different design method than other computing platforms, so there are no crashes, performance degradation , security breaches or downtime.
Additionally, Ruten said IBM Z systems can leverage OpenShift and Ansible for pre-packaged cloud workloads as well as hybrid cloud, as IBM acquired and then integrated Red Hat. In fact, IBM launches a new generation of mainframe every two and a half years, each time investing nearly a billion dollars in innovation. Ruten added that it might be surprising that rig shipments have been increasing since 2013.
Ruten said if IBM continues to strengthen the mainframe and secure interoperability with the cloud, there’s no reason the mainframe should go away, which is why IT managers like Shinsera are more realistic. “Pragmatic IT managers know that mainframes are essential, so they modernize on the platform, integrate with the rest of the data center, operate as a hybrid cloud, and take advantage of the new consumption-based pricing model of the platform,” he said.
Delta’s thoughts are the same for now. “Having a strong mainframe backbone goes well with delivering services through high-performance cloud capabilities,” says Shinsera. We are very happy with the current status quo,” suggesting that Delta will continue to use hybrid infrastructure in the future.
ciokr@idg.co.kr
