Southwest Airlines, situated in the US, has said that it is transferring its applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company claimed that the choice was made as part of its digital transformation project, which aims to enhance the passenger experience, increase operational effectiveness, and change how resources are allocated to its IT infrastructure. Everything from purchasing airline tickets to operational software supporting gate assignments, ground management, flight operations, and aviation maintenance will be covered. Southwest will use Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Lambda. The firm has not disclosed a migration schedule or the contract's financial terms with AWS.
In 2021, the company made its first announcement about adopting AWS as a cloud provider for its data lake services. Notwithstanding the agreement with Amazon, the airline still intends to keep up its data center in Dallas, Texas, according to a statement to the Dallas Morning News. Southwest Airlines had a significant technology failure that affected operations in December 2022. 2,500 flights, or more than 90% of the airline's scheduled flights, were canceled. It was allegedly caused by GE Digital's overloaded worker scheduling software.
Southwest Airlines attributes the hiccup in service to both the significant storm that battered the US and their obsolete scheduling software and equipment. The company said all scheduling had to be completed manually, which caused a substantial delay. It is hoped that switching to AWS will stop this from happening.
