Cathay Pacific takes customer experiences to new heights with Red Hat's hybrid cloud technologies

Using Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cathay Pacific created a more efficient and scalable platform for developing and delivering new services, enabling the company to ultimately create a better overall experience for their customers, Red Hat said in a press statement.

Based in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific is an international airline offering passenger and cargo services to 200 destinations in 52 countries and territories worldwide. Digital capabilities are a critical function of the company's business strategy for growth, with the heart of this initiative emphasizing a responsive and adaptable customer experience. Cathay Pacific's legacy infrastructure and development process posed a challenge, making it difficult for the airline to maintain a high level of performance from its internal systems and customer-facing applications. Its existing systems were inflexible and time consuming to modify, forcing the company to handle an increasing level of technical debt dedicated to system maintenance and "keeping the lights on."

Using Red Hat's open standards-based, enterprise technologies and guided by Red Hat's technical expertise, Cathay Pacific migrated from its legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud architecture, consisting of aprivate cloud environment that includes Red Hat OpenStack Platform which can provision workloads as needed into public cloudinstances. Forming the bridge to the public cloud is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which supports more than 50 consumer-facing applications. With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cathay Pacific is able to move applications in a more streamlined fashion across its hybrid infrastructure and is able to scale computing resources up and down as demand requires, the press statement added.

In addition to Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the foundation of its hybrid cloud, Cathay Pacific has implemented additional Red Hat technologies, including:

·         Red Hat CloudForms to manage its new architecture across its IT footprints. CloudForms provides self-service provisioning, tracks costs, and helps drive compliance across virtual machines, containers, physical infrastructure, including both public and private clouds.

·         Red Hat Ansible Tower helps Cathay Pacific automate the creation of new environments and standardize change requests, reducing the number of errors while taking less overall time to provision. With Red Hat Ansible Automation as part of Red Hat Ansible Tower, change requests that used to take two weeks are now automated and completed within 15 minutes.

·         Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, provides a scalable, more secure, and supported Linux foundation for Cathay Pacific's infrastructure.

·         Red Hat Satellite provides a streamlined way for Cathay Pacific to keep its Red Hat infrastructure running efficiently, up-to-date with security patches, and compliant with various industry standards.

​With its new IT architecture, Cathay Pacific is able to bring new services to market more expediently and better scale infrastructure to meet evolving application requirements.

Throughput for application deployment has been increased by a factor of 10, from 20 to 200 changes a day, for both production and non-production environments, with little-to-no end user downtime around these updates. Additionally, the new cloud environment has led to a reduced infrastructure footprint in terms of hardware, maintenance, and operations cost. With improved efficiency and better resource utilization, Cathay Pacific has lowered the total cost of ownership for its production environments.

Red Hat Consulting assisted Cathay Pacific nearly every step of the way, from the initial discovery session to identifying requirements and business-drivers through to technology implementation. Working with Red Hat Consulting also provided Cathay Pacific with hands-on expert support and training during the migration, including ongoing support as needed.