Coordination via cloud: Improving passenger experience at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

Schiphol airport is deploying APIs in cloud-based containers to manage customer-facing services

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam has set itself a goal of becoming Europe′s leading digital airport. In terms of improvements to the experience of passengers as they pass through Europe's fourth-busiest airport, this includes providing consistent real-time flight and check-in information, both to them and all parties that require it to smooth the service.

In broader terms, the aim is to improve the efficiency of the airport′s operations to facilitate better collaboration between airlines and other suppliers and to provide a more flexible platform to support new and existing applications.

In common with many other organisations looking to break down functional silos to increase efficiency, Schiphol focused on delivering services through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In line with this, a decision was made to migrate some customer-facing services from the airport′s central information system to a new cloud-based API platform.

"For APIs we did not have anything in place," technology lead Arie van der Veek, told Computing. "It was the easiest place to start because we did not have any legacy and the APIs are aimed at external facing customers for which public cloud is the perfect place to host the APIs."

The airport looked to containers to provide a flexible platform for its APIs as well as a basis for supporting more agile development practices in the future.

Containerisation provides the basis for proper DevOps in our opinion - Arie van der Veek

"Containerisation provides the basis for proper DevOps in our opinion," said van der Veek. "It supports clear separation of responsibilities between the DevOps team and the infrastructure teams using the ′Build, Ship, Run′ paradigm. This allows for a more structured collaboration between teams and a clear view on roles and responsibilities."

The platform

In terms of technology choices for the API platform, Schiphol opted for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, one benefit of which is that it spans the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud modes of deployment.

"We primarily use it for the scaling and container management features. It also gives a cloud service provider independent platform which helps us realise workload mobility across multiple cloud service providers," van der Veek explained.

The containerised APIs are run in the public cloud to make them accessible to the multiple parties that need to use them, he went on.

"We share a range of data via APIs. These APIs enable multiple parties to use the same data without errors in interpretation.

"We are currently running various APIs exposed by the API platform in containers using the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure. The API platform itself is Red Hat 3Scale API Management platform which is primarily SaaS. "

The team

Schiphol manages this API infrastructure entirely in-house. A surprisingly small operations team comprising just five people has this responsibility. The same team also looks after services such as VMware deployments, other cloud services and infrastructure.

On the applications side, there are plans to move other services to the container platform ranging from traditional enterprise applications to new microservices. Schiphol deploys 10 different DevOps teams, each with around seven members, to support and develop applications and shared services including the Enterprise Service Bus, event processing, API development and big data operations and analysis.

As ever, finding talent in new areas can be a challenge said van der Veek, especially against a wider backdrop of skills shortages, but his team has implemented ways to promote internally.

"The Netherlands has a major shortage of qualified IT personnel in general. Containerisation is fairly new in the enterprise space. So, it's hard to isolate it specifically to containerisation. We offer training programs to internal staff and they embrace and enjoy the change in skills. The new skills are not that far outside what they know already."

The Schiphol team chose to set up the enterprise cluster themselves, with help from Red Hat, rather than opting for the managed services option, which he describes as "quite some work", but worth it for the expertise gained.

"On the other hand, we would not have built up the deep understanding we have now on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform."

So far the API platform has delivered on its promise, van der Veek said.

"Our APIs on the platform handle 3 billion calls per year. Many of these calls are for our Flight API. These are all calls by various external parties, like websites, apps and B2B customers. We started the APIs about three years back. We wouldn't have been able to scale that traffic using traditional infrastructure."