How AWS helps Korean Airlines meet its business needs.

9 min readFeb 17, 2023

Korean Airlines

Korean Airlines founded in 1969, Korean Air is South Korea’s flag carrier and largest airline operating 156 passenger aircraft(Boeing 720 is an American narrow-body airliner produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes) serving 120 cities in 43 countries. In 2018, Korean Air began migrating its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud. Then in 2021, it became the first global, full-service carrier to complete an all-in migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As an innovator in the aviation industry, Korean Air chose to build on AWS, and it launched its new website and mobile app 90 percent faster than possible with its former on-premises infrastructure. Continuing to innovate on behalf of its customers and workforce, the airline is developing an online one-step buying option and AWS-powered machine learning tools to create predictive, pre-emptive maintenance for its aircraft fleet.

Korean Air becomes the first major global airline to go all-in on AWS Cloud (ref. https://www.koreanair.com/bn/en/footer/about-us/newsroom/list/)

Korean Air has completed the migration of its entire IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services Korea LLC (AWS), which comes three years after announcing its plans for cloud migration in November 2018.

Korean Air is the first global full-service carrier to complete an all-in migration to AWS. The airline will use AWS cloud capabilities to strengthen innovation and improve customer experience, giving the company a competitive edge in the post-COVID era.

“We are acquiring digital capabilities to lift our customer satisfaction levels to new heights, bringing us one step closer to becoming the world’s most loved airline,” said Kenneth Chang, Executive Vice President of Korean Air. “We’ve completed the largest IT modernization project in the airline’s 52-year history within a short period and are shifting our focus from solving problems to creating innovation faster with AWS cloud capabilities, which is especially important as travel starts to resume.”

■ Cloud migration to enable an active and flexible response to market changes

The IT system migration will help the airline to respond actively and flexibly to the changing market, including strict quarantine measures and increasing demand for contactless services during travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Korean Air upgraded its entire system to incorporate the required cloud technology and data to increase operational efficiency and innovate customer service.

Working with AWS and AWS Partner LG CNS in Korea, Korean Air moved its IT infrastructure, including data, network, and security systems, from an in-house data center to AWS to increase efficiency and simplify IT management.

Korean Air uses AWS cloud capabilities, including data analysis and machine learning, to further improve passenger services, flight reservation/ticketing systems, weather forecast predictions, and overall operations.

Offering customized passenger services using cloud capabilities

Korean Air plans to introduce a machine learning management service, which will allow the airline to create, train and apply machine learning models to improve customer service by forecasting passenger and cargo demand more accurately. The cloud will also help to enable the airline to better estimate flight delays due to weather conditions and predict aircraft maintenance time.

In addition, the all-in migration to AWS enables Korean Air to build a customer data platform in the cloud to offer more personalized customer services by allocating a unique digital identification tag to every passenger. Korean Air can use this tag and data analysis to tailor the services the airline offers to more accurately meet customer needs.

Korean Air also improved its customer service channels using a microservice architecture on AWS. Using the cloud, the airline launched its new website and mobile app 90% faster than it could use its legacy on-premises infrastructure. Customers can now purchase tickets on the airline’s new website in two instead of four steps, and a one-step buying option is being developed.

To build a culture of cloud innovation, Korean Air introduced the AWS Innovation Builder Program during its cloud migration to give employees the right skill sets to become data- and customer-centric and create a cloud-first culture. As part of this company-wide effort, Korean Air equipped 500 employees with basic cloud technology skills and brought the business and technology teams together to validate new ideas with speed and agility using AWS.

“As the travel market continues to rapidly evolve, the cloud gives airlines the agility to innovate,” said Kee Ho Ham, Managing Director of AWS Korea. “By going all-in on AWS, Korean Air has unlocked efficiencies across their operations and provided customers with new experiences they love. Korean Air’s modernization lays the foundation for the company to meet meaningful customer needs at every stage of passengers’ journeys.”

With new prospects made available through cloud migration and capabilities, Korean Air will continue to pursue new business opportunities and further improve customer service.

How Korean Air succeeded in managing the vaccine cold chain with Amazon Managed Blockchain

(Ref. https://aws.amazon.com/ko/blogs/database/)
After the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, Korean Air began transporting vaccines in February 2021. In the process, Korean Air realized the need to provide more accurate information between related stakeholders more reliably and turned to blockchain technology. Korean Air confirmed that blockchain is suitable for improving traceability, transparency, and accuracy of cargo transportation with supply chain characteristics, so they decided to apply Amazon Managed Blockchain to the vaccine cold chain.

Since 2021, vaccines have become a more important part of Korean Air’s transport business. However, transporting vaccines is an expensive and complicated process because they are classified as special cargo and are particularly temperature sensitive. To service this important business, Korean Air needed a way to provide transportation-related information in an accurate, timely, and reliable manner.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 50% of the world’s vaccine shipments are discarded during storage and transportation due to mishandling and inappropriate equipment. It’s important to control the temperature of the entire cycle, from the production site of the vaccine to the time of inoculation, but the transportation container is the most vulnerable. A ULD (Unit Load Device) is a container that can bundle and transport multiple cargoes. A special type of ULD used to transport vaccines is a temperature-controlled container. A temperature sensor is attached to the inside of the temperature-controlled container, which periodically measures the temperature even after the container is onboard an aircraft. By checking this information after it’s unloaded from the aircraft, we can ensure that it was safely transported inside the aircraft.

Why did Korean Air choose blockchain?

The previous cargo service consisted of a three-level centralized system: a relay network, a cargo system, and a homepage. Forwarders had to enter cargo information such as departure airports and destination airports through relay networks, but some important forwarders directly entered cargo information into the cargo system without going through relay networks. Korean Air, which is in charge of transportation, entered transportation information such as departure time, arrival time, and stopover through the cargo system and these stakeholders checked the cargo information and transportation information through a separate web application. As described previously, it’s important to share real-time temperature history information and verify that there is no forgery or falsification in the entire cold chain distribution process. Since the existing system consists of three centralized systems, the transit network, the cargo system, and the web application, and data is stored and managed separately, it is difficult to ensure data consistency and track change history. As a result, Korean Air evaluated blockchain, and ultimately chose Managed Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric, a private network. The following diagrams compare the previous architecture to the current solution.

To successfully implement blockchain, Korean Air considered three important requirements: data, members, and information organization.

First, they needed to think about what data to store on the blockchain. Because blockchain is relatively expensive storage, selecting and sharing valuable and reliable information with participants is important.

Second, they needed to consider who can participate in the blockchain network. A private network must first select members to share data with, and Korean Air, a transport provider, is the first member. Another member is a forwarder, a company that handles the cargo import and export business and provides necessary information such as temperature and import to shippers.

Finally, they needed to think about how to organize information into blockchain blocks. Similar considerations are required in blockchains, just as transactions are considered when storing information in a database. How to classify information into blocks, what key to use when importing blocks, and how to search accumulated data history should be considered.

AWS Blockchain services

AWS Quantum Ledger Database

Fully managed ledger database that provides a centralized, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log

AWS Managed Blockchain

Fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks and distributed ledger technology. Multiple parties can transact with one another without having to know or trust each other. Each party, known as a member, owns a peer node in the network.

Blockchain structure

The vaccine cargo service organized its information into three blocks:

Air Way Bill (AWB) — The AWB number is the waybill number and has a similar concept to the courier number
Temperature — This block provides the ULD number, airport, time, ULD internal and external temperature, and ULD battery information
Goods Acceptance — This block provides information about when the ULD will be loaded into the warehouse

Similar to databases, blockchains also require keys for efficient lookup and storage. We decided to use the AWB number as the key to tie these three blocks together. Finally, we had to figure out how to save information so that temperature and inflow information is provided in real-time and historical queries can be completed in a performant manner. For example, since the AWB number is used as the primary key when storing data off-chain, a key is created based on the AWB number to make it easier to search related data in the blockchain.

Blockchain network setup with Hyperledger Fabric

The flow of the Hyperledger Fabric network setup is as follows:

Korean Air initiates the network in Amazon Managed Blockchain and simultaneously joins as the first member.
The forwarder then joins the network with another AWS account. They create a channel to pass blocks between peer nodes.
Next, the members create a chain code to handle the actual business logic and install and instantiate the chain code on a block.
Finally, you can read or write to the block via the chain code.

In the overall structure, the orderer is responsible for creating new blocks, and Fabric CA is the certification authority that manages the roles and privileges of authorized users.

Overall architecture

To make the service easily accessible, we wrap the deployed chain code in an API. In the case of cargo blockchain, a RESTful API was created in the Fabric client on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2), and a webpage was created on AWS Fargate. For security and authentication, Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Cognito were added.

Blockchain service mechanism

Now, two members, Korean Air, and the forwarder can use the blockchain service through the RESTful API. As a prerequisite, members, and users must be participating and register in the blockchain network. When a user requests a transaction, the peer validates the transaction and returns a signature. The signed transaction is submitted to the orderer. The orderer creates a new block for the transaction and broadcasts it to all the peer nodes. When the new block is recorded on the ledger, it gives a response to the client side. Although the blockchain mechanism may seem complicated, the blockchain provides a decentralized store of information existing in several places simultaneously, making the data difficult to forge.

The final webpage is configured to check each of the three blocks. Even if the backend is configured as a blockchain, the front end uses familiar technology to allow users to access blockchain data through the RESTful API, and mobile applications can be easily implemented.