Ryanair to shift its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services and close "almost all" its data centres

Ryanair going "all in" on AWS to rebuild business around machine learning

Budget airline Ryanair is planning to migrate almost its entire IT infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services and to close "the vast majority" of its datacentres over the next three years.

The company already runs a number of its core production workloads on AWS - and therefore shouldn't be surprised by any hidden extra costs. These production workloads include Ryanair Rooms and Ryanair.com.

It is also building what it describes as a company-wide data lake of customer and business data on Amazon S3 that it will use for business analytics, applying machine learning to deliver quicker insights.

In the process, it will effectively tie itself into the Amazon ecosystem by rebuilding legacy systems on various AWS services, including databases, analytics and machine learning.

The aim of the migration, claimed Ryanair chief technology officer John Hurley, is "to develop and deliver services that will transform our customers' travel experiences," he said.

He continued: "By rebuilding core applications, converting data into actionable insights, and creating intelligent applications, we are putting the solutions in place to continue our leadership in the travel industry."

He said that the airline placed particular importance on machine learning to the company's future growth, and added that the company would be "pursuing a variety of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker" in order to improve and better personalise the user interface on the MyRyanair portal as a first step.

He continued: "We're currently trialing Amazon Lex to enhance our customer support experience, by intelligently routing customer support requests to the right type of assistance - whether that is a customer support representative or an artificial intelligence-driven interaction.

"We were also one of the first companies in Europe to support Amazon Alexa, and created the MyRyanair skill for Amazon Alexa to handle account booking, flight inquiries, and frequently asked questions."

After Ryanair rebuilt Ryanair Rooms on AWS, it claims that customers can now quickly compare "millions" of hotel deals, while Ryanair's work with the AWS ML Solutions Lab will create an application that enables the company to automatically detect surges in demand for flight segments and anticipate schedule changes (and, presumably, change pricing accordingly).

Hurley also claimed that shifting from an in-house Microsoft SQL Server database to Amazon Aurora enabled the company to run major email marketing campaigns across Europe - involving 22 million emails daily - at a fraction of the cost.