Korean Air Modernizes Critical Systems with Red Hat

To deliver on its motto ‘excellence in flight’, Korean Air strives to provide reliable services that customers can trust. Running an airline requires a complex environment of connected systems and applicatons. To keep up with growing volumes of data and changing customer demands, Korean Air decided to modernize its environment and migrate to the public cloud. It partnered with Red Hat Consulting to roll out the new architecture and used Red Hat Application Foundations to modernize critical systems and connect them with internal and partner applications. The new environment is reliable and has double the processing power of the previous system. This helps the company to retain its competitive edge and continue giving customers a seamless experience.

Benefits:

• Modernized critical passenger- facing systems
• Boosted performance with 100% increase in transaction speed
• Improved efficiency and data integration  with Red Hat Foundation Application

Korean Air, headquartered in the Gangseo District of Seoul, is the country’s largest airline, and a respected global leader in aviation. Founded with eight aircraft in 1969, Korean Air now employs 17,000 people and serves 125 locations.

“Our vision is to deliver on our motto, ‘excellence in flight’, and to become customers’ most loved airline,” said Byun, Bong Sup, CIO, IT Strategy Department at Korean Air, and he said, “We strive to provide reliable services that our customers can trust.”

Korean Air has safety and customer-centric service as core values and is positioned as a leading global airline, having been listed as a top 10 airline by Skytrax in 2023.

To keep up with changing customer expectations and increasing demand, the airline needs IT systems to be fast, reliable, and scalable. But growing volumes of passenger data could have impacted  system performance and disrupted daily operations.

After analyzing existing systems, the IT team questioned whether the environment could continue to meet the airline’s needs and were concerned about rising costs and vendor lock-in. Mr Byun said, “We decided to modernize our IT systems and expand into the cloud to ensure we could continue providing a stable and trusted customer experience.”

This enterprise-wide public cloud adoption required the modernization of critical systems and applications to make them more efficient, but airline systems are highly complex and diverse. Not only do multiple applications need to work together seamlessly every day, but the system also needs to be able to handle seasonal schedule changes, which involves processing large volumes of data.

Ahn, Tae Soo, IT Strategy Department, Passenger IT Team at Korean Air said, “My team is responsible for managing the data behind passenger services. We have to rely on middleware platforms to process operational and service data, and those need to integrate with both internal and affiliate or partner systems.”

For example, the Cargo Integration Platform (CIP) and Passenger Integration Platform (PIP) shape the customer experience from booking through the AMADEUS application to managing cargo with the iCargo application. These systems were over 20 years old and integrated with more than 100 passenger and 50 freight systems. 

When an event is run, real-time service data moves through a connected ecosystem and syncs with different departments, such as customer service, finance, hospitality, and operations. Any delay in this process could impact the passenger experience or make cargo management more difficult.

“Keeping CIP and PIP on-premises would have increased lead times, and we’d need a bigger team to update and operate the infrastructure,” said Moon, Ji Young, IT Strategy Department, Passenger IT Team at Korean Air. “As well as migrating to the cloud, we needed a tool to streamline the integration of the many systems involved in running an airline.”

Korean Air started benchmark testing to evaluate solutions that could be used for a new CIP system build in 2017. They needed a multi-cloud solution that was supplier-independent and provided stable builds and support services.

As a result of comparing IBM, TIBCO, Traxon Korea, in-house development solutions, and Red Hat solutions, Red Hat Application Foundations emerged as the most suitable. As they subsequently proceeded with innovation of a larger scale PIP system, they decided to deploy Red Hat products, which had been impressive when the initial CIP proof-of-concept was conducted. These solutions provide integrated toolsets that can span hybrid infrastructures and link applications and data.

Ms Moon said, “Red Hat is an open source powerhouse. The technology is lightweight, scalable, portable, and stable. We’re familiar with Red Hat technology, so we had some existing skills, but we worked alongside Red Hat Consulting to get the best from our implementation.”

In 2021, the airline worked with Red Hat Consulting to start getting its legacy environment cloud-ready for the migration to AWS. Red Hat streamlined the implementation, addressing any issues that arose until the new environment was live and stable.

Red Hat and Korean Air then worked together to build cloud-native architecture for CIP, using lessons learned from the project to make the subsequent PIP modernization easier and less risky.

“We built hundreds of interfaces with Red Hat Application Foundations and integrated all the tools that developers, IT, and business teams need,” said Mr Ahn. “Red Hat Application Foundations has a lot of different components, but Red Hat helped us to navigate the solution and find what we needed.”

Korean Air also used Red Hat Application Foundation to integrate both internal and external services to AWS in real-time, minimizing any disruption to operations. This platform helps to build, deploy, and operate applications at scale across hybrid cloud environments, modernize and simplify systems.

Modernized critical passenger-facing systems  

Korean Air now has a modern cloud environment supporting the customer experience. It’s lightweight, agile, and streamlines real-time data integration as volumes of data grow. Moving to cloud has made the company more agile, which means it can respond quickly to changing customer expectations, emerging market demands, and scale to accommodate both fluctuations in demand and company growth.

“While it’s important to use technology with a modern user interface and the latest frameworks, it’s the availability and reliability of our environment that makes it truly innovative,” said Mr Ahn.

Boosted performance with 100% increase in transaction speed 

Freed from capacity restraints and latency issues, the airline has doubled load tolerance for feed processing. This supports faster transactions and creates a smoother user experience. It also means systems such as PIP and CIP are more reliable, which reduces the risk of low customer satisfaction scores.

“An airline’s systems are very complex and require many applications to work together seamlessly without conflicts,” said Ms Moon. “We saw significant performance gains as a result of using Red Hat technologies.”

Improved efficiency and data integration with Red Hat Application Foundation

By improving communication between systems and data integration, Korean Air now has more efficient and stable architecture supporting the staff and customer experience. This will help to reduce operational and maintenance costs, simplify meeting compliance and security requirements, and help to deliver the leading customer experience that passengers have come to expect from the airline.

“Modernizing our processes for the cloud means we can provide stable, trusted services to customers,” said Mr Byun.

Following the success of the modernization, Korean Air is considering how it can leverage Red Hat solutions to expand and optimize its environment. “The middleware team have already adopted Red Hat Application Foundations and we’re contemplating linking our standard messaging platform, Kafka, through it as well,” said Ms Moon. “We knew Red Hat was a good solution, but you need to experience it firsthand to understand the full benefits.”

The team is also exploring Red Hat AMQ Streams, provided as a part of Red Hat Application Foundations, which is a distributed and massively scalable data streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. It allows microservices and applications to share data with high throughput and low latency. “Red Hat AMQ Streams can support any environment at no extra cost, which aligns with our vendor-agnostic approach,” said Mr Ahn. “With Red Hat Consulting’s support, we’re confident we can get even better results from Red Hat Application Foundations as we continue to optimize our environment.”