Southwest Airlines shared in a media release on March 8 that it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider.
The
U.S. airline is using AWS to optimize operations, streamline
infrastructure costs, and enhance digital customer experiences.
- In
late Dec. 2022, severe winter weather caused thousands of flight
cancellations, overwhelming the company's flight system and resulting in
a complete meltdown. The company's reliance on outdated legacy systems was found to have enabled its system to crash.
- Since this incident and the recent FAA system failure, airline industry consultants have been urging airlines to adopt cloud-based tools to prevent and mitigate system collapses.
- Now,
Southwest has heeded this advice with its large-scale modernization
plan with AWS. According to its media release, Southwest will leverage
the automatic scaling capabilities of AWS cloud technology to accelerate
real-time airfare searches on its website and mobile app.
- The
airline is using AWS Lambda and the Amazon S3 storage solution to build
a secure system that collects and stores pricing and shopping data.
