Senior VP of Technology & Chief Information Officer, Southwest Airlines Co
AWS re:Invent 2020 – Lauren Woods of Southwest Airlines on using AWS to improve its technical health
Southwest Airlines uses AWS and AWS partners, like Onica, to help it build the technology it needs to thrive. In this video, Lauren Woods, Managing Director of Technology Platforms, describes how AWS helps Southwest become more efficient, technically advanced, and able to take on new opportunities. Southwest Airlines is the largest carrier by originating passengers in the U.S., celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2021. Southwest Airlines uses a variety of AWS services, including Amazon Aurora and Amazon EKS, to modernize its applications, and it used AWS Lake Formation, Amazon S3, and Amazon A...
About Lauren Woods
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."
Transcript (8 segments)
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Lauren Woods0:10
Turbulence of these challenging times for our industry. If you've ever taken a flight on Southwest, you know we're an airline with a unique personality. You see it reflected in the way we do business and the way we fly, but you especially see it in our people. Southwest Airlines employees have welcomed, served, and appreciated our customers with heart for half a century. Our purpose is to connect people to what's important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. Southwest Airlines started in 1971 as a scrappy little airline with just four aircraft serving three cities. We called it the Texas Triangle. But today, after revolutionizing the industry with low fares and friendly service, Southwest is the largest carrier in the United States based on originating passengers.
Fortune has consistently recognized us as one of the world's most admired companies, and in 2019 we recorded a profit for our 47th consecutive year, an unparalleled feat in the airline industry. And then came 2020, a year of global pandemic and unprecedented downturn. This is by far the most challenging time that Southwest Airlines has faced. But we're not shrinking from this challenge. Instead, we see it as an opportunity to improve our technical health and emerge stronger at the end. Our goal isn't just to survive. Our people are busy building the technology and applications we need to thrive. Like I said, we have a history of being scrappy and resilient.
Complicated and unique, so it's no surprise that our technology applications and infrastructure grew in the same scrappy organic fashion as the rest of the company. We were used to building our own special capabilities and applications to meet our unique needs. Although Southwest was leading the market with our on-time performance and incredible customer satisfaction, we also had critical applications that were increasingly inflexible and could not change to meet our customers' needs. Our scrappy collection of applications was starting to feel like technical debt. We needed to make a move, a move to the cloud to take advantage of the transformational benefits. But unlike a lot of enterprise businesses, we didn't start with the data center migration. Instead, we were looking to create a new
It also offered an impressive community of AWS professionals, developers, and partners we were going to need to be successful. Finding the right partner to complement our culture with an adaptable approach was especially important to us, because we weren't just looking for somebody to do the work for us. We wanted partners that had deep skills in the AWS platform and could help us reskill our people to modernize our applications. And we found that in Annika. We rallied our efforts around re-architecting Op Suite, a major application that had been plagued with cold starts, manual deployments, and static infrastructure. Working with Annika, we learned to utilize Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service to support the scheduling of flights, assignments of our gates, the productivity of our turns, and the
Cost. We used Amazon EKS to automatically roll deployments utilizing health checks and can automatically roll back to previous versions if there's any issues. It makes deployments safer and entirely automated. As weather, maintenance crews, and other flights impact departure and arrival times, Southwest and its customers now have access to the most accurate information faster than ever before. Following our success with Op Suite, we started several other projects and began to expand our AWS footprint. In addition to Annika, we engaged with other great AWS partners, utilizing their specialization and expertise to continue to learn and grow our own AWS experience. We took on our crew ecosystem, a suite of
The native database service of Amazon Aurora. The performance and scalability allowed us to leave behind more expensive technologies. But we didn't stop there. We continued to learn by building our very first cloud-native data lake utilizing AWS Lake Formation, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena. Now we work with NASA and air traffic control on accurately predicting off-block time and gate arrival time, and can make better decisions on departure routings and gate assignments, resulting in significant cost savings. Southwest took all this great learning and created standards and design patterns called the Southwest Cloud Common Platform. These are easily consumable modules to encourage consistency.
Experience in cloud technologies and built an application from scratch, a mission-critical, scalable, cloud-native solution in six months at Southwest scale. And we did it while our teams were all working remotely due to the pandemic. The Low Fare Marketing Automation application allows us to send our customers the lowest available fare in a personalized way while still meeting our Department of Transportation regulatory requirements. It has exceeded our business expectations and will be highly used to help us weather the current challenges we face. With the expertise and best practices we've learned from working with AWS partners, Southwest is more efficient, more technically advanced, and more capable to take on new
With the breadth and depth of resources needed to fight our way through this. Even as Southwest has grown, we have never lost that scrappy, resilient spirit. I'm confident that with the support of AWS and our AWS partners, and especially the heart of our people, we will emerge from this storm of challenging times stronger than ever before.