How do Amadeus and Red Hat innovate the open source way

Published September 27, 2016   |   

No matter how you look at it, open source has become the de facto standard for enterprise software development, distribution and adoption. Amadeus’s excellent post highlights eight reasons why Amadeus has adopted open source software. And, Udo Seidel explains why open source is a key ingredient for innovation.

Amadeus and Red Hat have a long history of working together on open source software, starting with Red Hat JBoss Middleware, and more recently, OpenShift, Red Hat’s container application platform. Amadeus is also a big user of Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, Angular, and many other open source projects. Working together in open source communities enables us to be closer to our customers, react more quickly to emerging opportunities, and contribute code in upstream projects.

In this post, I want to share some further insights into how Amadeus and Red Hat collaborate the open source way.

The challenge

As the travel industry is transforming into a digital marketplace connecting hundreds of millions of passengers with travel agencies, airlines and operators online or via mobile devices, Amadeus was faced with a challenge to provide scalable and highly available application infrastructure and services that could not only handle billions of transactions and records and meet regulatory requirements, but which would also enable them to respond reliably and quickly to consumer demand. These business requirements led engineers from both teams to design and implement a new infrastructure architecture for scaling out across data centers and into the cloud, and to use OpenShift as the underlying, open source platform for delivering container-based applications at scale.

How we’re delivering together

The Amadeus Cloud Services team is an early adopter of OpenShift, containers and Kubernetes and Amadeus engineers are very active in OpenShift Origin. By actively participating in the upstream open source community, Amadeus can better influence the platform’s future, ultimately making sure the commercial version will meet their needs – a contribution which can benefit other customers as well.

When you put new software into production early, it is natural that you may discover ideas for new capabilities and use cases previously not thought of. Amadeus needed the ability to run batch jobs in Kubernetes. Working closely together, Amadeus and Red Hat engineers were able to commit code in the upstream project led by Google that ended up shipping as part of the Kubernetes job controller. This, in turn, not only benefits Amadeus, but also the broader community of current and future Kubernetes users.

Another example is OpenShift Commons which is the community hub for the entire OpenShift ecosystem of users, contributors, upstream project leads and service providers. OpenShift Commons goes beyond upstream code contribution because it builds connections and collaboration across multiple communities, projects, and stakeholders. Amadeus has been an active leader in the OpenShift Commons community, and is at the forefront of sharing insights, use cases and best practices on topics like DevOps, infrastructure architecture design or container orchestration with their peers across the community and at industry events like Red Hat Summit.

The Result

Amadeus Cloud Services provides developers with a well-defined framework to build, deploy and manage applications consistently and in a more streamlined, automated fashion. By decoupling applications from the underlying infrastructure, Amadeus can deploy applications across multiple data centers and in the cloud. From a business standpoint, Amadeus is enhancing the traveler’s experience, and has the ability to offer new services more rapidly at global scale.

What’s next

Engineers and product managers from Red Hat, Amadeus and another partner are currently working together on a new initiative around OpenShift and database-as-a-service. Stay tuned for more details on this development in a future post.

In summary, we’ve been fortunate to be working closely with Amadeus on so many levels based on a common technological vision and goals. Without open source, this level of collaboration and innovation that benefits the broader community and enables us to deliver significant business value to our customers would not have been possible.