Maintenance Platform Deployment on Oracle Cloud
Yet, with the number of departures increasing nearly 45% from last year, GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes (GOL) is facing intense pressure to keep its expanding fleet of Boeing 737s operating at full capacity.
To ensure its 90 B737-800 aircraft, 23 B737-700 aircraft, and 10 B737 MAX 8s are always ready for takeoff, GOL decided to move its on-premises maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
In its GOL Aerotech division, which was launched in 2019, GOL runs its flagship MRO facility from the Tancredo Neves International Airport, located in Confins, Brazil. There, GOL employs 760 aircraft technicians who spend more than 350,000 hours each year repairing and overhauling airframes, engines, electronic systems, wheels, and parts, resulting in more than 600,000 hours of aircraft availability and a 98% on-time delivery and aircraft release rates for heavy maintenance services. Not only is GOL qualified to perform maintenance services for its own aircraft, it also provides MRO services for other companies and airlines that operate Boeing 737 Next Generation, 737 Classic, 737 MAX and Boeing 767 family aircraft. GOL is also certified by national and international regulators such as ANAC (National Agency Civil Aviation Administration, Brazil), the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration, United States) and EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency).
To help scale its MRO service operations, GOL recently moved its MRO platform from an on-premises data center to OCI. After moving to OCI, the Brazilian airline has been able to swiftly complete maintenance services and logistics procedures, identify skilled technicians, locate parts, and release aircraft, while maintaining high quality standards, and guaranteeing rigorous performance and reliability service level agreements (SLAs). In addition to becoming Brazil's top on-time airline and possessing an industry leading 18-year safety record, GOL has invested billions of reais in its MRO facilities, services, and technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences in the air and on the ground.
After moving the AMOS MRO platform to OCI, GOL has been able to:
- Reduce IT infrastructure footprint by 40%
- Decrease costs by 60%, using fewer CPUs
- Improve response time of the AMOS MRO application by 30%
- Achieve 100% up-time with zero reported incidents
Architecture
GOL Linhas Aéreas Inteligentes (GOL) tapped Oracle's Cloud Lift Service (CLS) to move its Swiss Aviation Software's AMOS maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) platform from an on premises data center to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region in São Paulo, Brazil.
After migrating AMOS to OCI, GOL's MRO workloads were reinstalled to help tighten security and create a more comprehensive governance model. The core of the AMOS MRO application is a Sybase database, which migrated to OCI instances as part of the CLS service. The AMOS MRO platform has multiple integration points, including:
- Oracle Service Oriented Architecture and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning instances
- Boeing training and certification systems
- Lufthansa's NetLine airline operations systems, which is replicated to an Oracle Exadata Database Service instance and hosted in the AMOS OCI environment.
All these integration points send critical data to AMOS, providing GOL's crews real-time information to perform both routine and unscheduled maintenance checks on demand.
GOL has designed a hub and spoke network topology. The primary connection provides on-premises connectivity by using FastConnect and a dynamic routing gateway (DRG) on the hub VCN. A secondary connection uses a site-to-site VPN tunnel from on-premises to the hub VCN. The hub VCNs are connected by using local peering gateways (LPGs). Additional VCNs are connected by using LPGs as spokes. Core services are deployed to the hub VCN, while applications, such as AMOS, are deployed in a spoke VCN. The spoke VCN contains subnets for front-end applications, back-end applications, databases, and backup traffic. Traffic is controlled through route tables and security lists. applications are accessed through the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network, and integrations to third-party systems are connected by using an internet gateway in the spoke VCN.
For backups, GOL uses OCI's native features, as well as Commvault. In addition, GOL has taken advantage of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resource Manager and Terraform, helping to automate the process of provisioning resources in OCI. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resource Manager and Terraform, GOL has used infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts to automate the provisioning of services and resources for the AMOS infrastructure. GOL can now recreate the AMOS infrastructure in the OCI region in Ashburn for example, in less than an hour. This region can also be used in a disaster recovery scenario.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
gol-maintenance-oci-oracle.zip
The architecture has the following components:
- Tenancy
A tenancy is a secure and isolated partition that Oracle sets up within Oracle Cloud when you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can create, organize, and administer your resources in Oracle Cloud within your tenancy. A tenancy is synonymous with a company or organization. Usually, a company will have a single tenancy and reflect its organizational structure within that tenancy. A single tenancy is usually associated with a single subscription, and a single subscription usually only has one tenancy.
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the access control plane for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Cloud Applications. The IAM API and the user interface enable you to manage identity domains and the resources within the identity domain. Each OCI IAM identity domain represents a standalone identity and access management solution or a different user population.
- Audit
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Audit service automatically records calls to all supported Oracle Cloud Infrastructure public application programming interface (API) endpoints as log events. Currently, all services support logging by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Audit.
- Policy
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management policy specifies who can access which resources, and how. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy.
- Compartment
Compartments are cross-region logical partitions within an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Use compartments to organize your resources in Oracle Cloud, control access to the resources, and set usage quotas. To control access to the resources in a given compartment, you define policies that specify who can access the resources and what actions they can perform.
- Availability domain
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.
- Fault domain
A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Each availability domain has three fault domains with independent power and hardware. When you distribute resources across multiple fault domains, your applications can tolerate physical server failure, system maintenance, and power failures inside a fault domain.
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Security list
For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
- Route table
Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
- Internet gateway
The internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
- FastConnect
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect provides an easy way to create a dedicated, private connection between your data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
- Local peering gateway (LPG)
An LPG enables you to peer one VCN with another VCN in the same region. Peering means the VCNs communicate using private IP addresses, without the traffic traversing the internet or routing through your on-premises network.
- Network address translation (NAT) gateway
A NAT gateway enables private resources in a VCN to access hosts on the internet, without exposing those resources to incoming internet connections.
- Load balancer
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end.
- Object storage
Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
- Compute
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute service enables you to provision and manage compute hosts in the cloud. You can launch compute instances with shapes that meet your resource requirements for CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage. After creating a compute instance, you can access it securely, restart it, attach and detach volumes, and terminate it when you no longer need it.
- Exadata DB system
Oracle Exadata Database Service enables you to leverage the power of Exadata in the cloud. You can provision flexible X8M systems that allow you to add database compute servers and storage servers to your system as your needs grow. X8M systems offer RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) networking for high bandwidth and low latency, persistent memory (PMEM) modules, and intelligent Exadata software. You can provision X8M systems by using a shape that's equivalent to a quarter-rack X8 system, and then add database and storage servers at any time after provisioning.
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