Lauren Woods

Senior VP of Technology & Chief Information Officer, Southwest Airlines

Search every verified Lauren Woods interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Lauren Woods, then Managing Director of Technology Platforms at Southwest Airlines, spoke at AWS re:Invent 2020 about the airline’s cloud migration and partnership with AWS and its partner Onica. She described 2020 as "by far the most challenging time that Southwest Airlines has faced" but said the company viewed it as "an opportunity to improve our technical health." Woods noted that Southwest had recorded a profit for its 47th consecutive year in 2019 and that the airline used AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lake Formation to modernize applications. She stated that the company created a "southwest cloud common platform" to encourage consistency and that a team with no prior cloud experience built a mission-critical application in six months while working remotely. Woods highlighted specific outcomes from the cloud migration, including the ability to test and deploy updates "multiple times a week during the day" rather than overnight on a monthly or quarterly basis. She also said Southwest worked with NASA and air traffic control to improve predictions of off-block and gate arrival times, resulting in "significant cost savings." Woods expressed confidence that with AWS support and the airline's employees, Southwest would "emerge from this storm of challenging times stronger than ever before."