Case Study: Industry Use Case Of OpenShift — Amadeus

5 min readMar 13, 2021

This article discusses how the industry is using OpenShift in its production. It sheds light on OpenShift, why it is important, how using OpenShift Amadeus got benefited.

About Amadeus

Amadeus is a leading provider of technology products and solutions that keep the travel sector moving. Amadeus technology solutions help customers — travel agencies, corporations, airlines, ground handlers, hotels, railways, car rental companies, airports, cruise lines, and ferry operators — improve business performance. By working with customers and partners and maintaining a strong commitment to R&D, Amadeus is shaping the future of travel.

It is present in 195 countries, with employees of more than 19000+. It helps customers from various travel ecosystems, It takes care of the entire travel life cycle. It helps in Airline booking, Hotel booking, car rental, working with travel agencies, and many more.

All the transactions were done from its headquarters in Germany. Here are some facts about its operations

645+ million bookings processed in 2019

1.9+ billion passengers boarded in 2019

1.6+ Billion data requests per day

100000+ transactions per single booking

Customers from various countries reach their main data center and have their requests done. All this leads to some delay in its operations, latency, many services have to be deployed, managing the services.

These are some of the main constraints

Matching traveler’s reservation requests to various providers’ inventory
Dealing with constant updates from provider systems all over the world
Providing high consistency and fast response times
Managing very high request volumes of up to ~210,000 queries per second at peak

Amadeus owns and operates one of the largest data centers in the world. The datacenter includes more than 30 petabytes of storage and more than 12,000 infrastructure devices. During peak operations, it processes more than 30,000 end-user transactions per second and executes more than 31 billion SQL instructions each day.

“We needed a state-of-the-art computing platform that would improve our customers’ performance,”
“As a trusted partner to the travel industry, our technology must help customers meet the increasingly complex demands of travelers around the world.”

said Christophe Defayet, director of software development, security, and communication systems at Amadeus.

To solve this problem, Amadeus partnered with Red Hat to build a system that can handle these issues. It used the Red Hat OpenShift Platform to create its own cloud platform called Amadeus Cloud Services.

The main aim is to get a Multi data Center capability that is independent of the underlying infrastructure of the platform, so that they can serve close to the customer decreasing latency, High availability, Low network issues.

The application is Application Centric Deployment meaning all the dependencies are stored in one box, It helps in simple operation, Reproducibility, Technical support.

These are some of the benefits of creating their own platform:

DECREASED SYSTEM LATENCY AND IMPROVED PLATFORM AVAILABILITY

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps in increasing system performance, reduce latency, and rapidly adapt to peak load increases and new application deployment. In case of a system failure or server downtime, applications can now be redeployed on another part of the network.

STREAMLINED OPERATIONS THROUGH AUTOMATION Red Hat OpenShift

Container Platform automates many common system management and administration tasks

“By more efficiently and effectively managing our applications, we will be able to streamline operations”

REDUCED TIME TO MARKET FOR NEW APPLICATIONS

With standard methods for deploying applications, provisioning capacity, and operating the solution, This helps Amadeus to focus on meeting customers’ business needs.

For this work, Red Hat awarded the whole team of Amadeus with “Red Hat Innovation of the Year 2016”.

ACS is built on top of OpenShift, Docker engine runtime, and Kubernetes Management.

After this work Amadeus also started contributing to the open-source community, Here is the link for all its contributions.

Now we know about the Industry use cases let us dive into What is OpenShift?

What is Open Shift?

RedHat OpenShift is a Kubernetes container platform that provides a trusted environment to run enterprise workload. OpenShift helps you to develop and deploy applications to one or more hosts.

OpenShift enables efficient container orchestration, allowing rapid container provisioning, deploying, scaling, and management. The tool enhances the DevOps process by streamlining and automating the container management process.

OpenShift refers to the downstream container orchestration technology derived from the OKD open source project (previously known as OpenShift Origin). “Red Hat OpenShift” refers to the suite of container orchestration products by Red Hat.