GE Aviation Modernizes Technology Stack and Improves Data Accessibility Using Amazon Redshift

Aircraft engine supplier GE Aviation works with customers in regions around the world, storing and analyzing data that often has different levels of restrictions and must comply with varying security regulations. The company manages a large on-premises data system, but this results in multiple data pipelines that prove to be costly operational burdens. In addition, trying to predict when and how much it needs to manually scale makes it difficult to react quickly to spikes in usage or influxes of data. 

GE Aviation has turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernize its technology stack and improve overall data accessibility. The company adopted multiple AWS services, including Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning to deliver optimal price performance at any scale. By migrating to AWS, GE Aviation seeks to improve its agility while better navigating strict government regulations regarding access permissions.

An operating unit of General Electric, GE Aviation is a global provider of jet engines, components, and systems for commercial and military aircraft. The company has been designing, developing, and manufacturing jet engines since World War I. Because the company is a subcontractor for the United States Department of Defense, its handling of data has to meet strict and often complex governmental compliance standards. GE Aviation often has to move data before sharing it with customers or across departments to comply with US regulations regarding permissions. It has also become increasingly difficult to manage its large on-premises data lake as the company spends time and money on hardware upgrades, networking, licensing, and server performance. To prepare for anticipated peak loads on the previous system, GE Aviation had to pay in advance for hardware upgrades and plan for additional staffing. “We found ourselves in a tricky situation when it came to balancing the underlying infrastructure planning cycles as well as the overall hardware and software licensing cycles,” says Alcuin Weidus, GE Aviation’s senior principal data architect. “It demonstrated to us that without taking more drastic steps to modernize our data stack using AWS, this was going to be our ongoing reality.” 

After an extensive evaluation of cloud data warehousing solutions, GE Aviation began migrating its data to Amazon Redshift. Rather than existing as a stand-alone data warehouse, Amazon Redshift is set to become the focal point of GE Aviation’s digital transformation. More than halfway through its migration as of May 2022, the company had migrated around 20,000 tables to the cloud, comprising nearly 80 TB of data.

Because Amazon Redshift is a fully managed solution, GE Aviation will no longer have the responsibility of managing its servers, which proved time consuming and costly when the company had to prepare to scale its on-premises hardware. Using Amazon Redshift, the company can adjust instance types and sizes overnight. Moreover, it can share data across its production and nonproduction environments in ways that weren’t possible when it was managing an on-premises environment. Developers and data engineers can now safely work against the company’s production data without the risks inherent in moving data. “Using Amazon Redshift is a really stable way to put our data in the right position in the cloud,” Weidus says. “This provides us with tremendous value because we see what we can build over the years. We’ve positioned ourselves to avoid another large-scale migration in the future. Our focus will be on value creation.” Crucial to GE Aviation’s success are Amazon Redshift RA3 instances, which make it possible to scale compute and storage independently for fast query performance and lower costs. “Using Amazon Redshift RA3 instances, we can modernize our technology stack in place without having to worry about future cycles of migrating data constantly,” Weidus says. “AWS is evolving and innovating alongside us, giving our users the ability to choose their own compute tool without us having to go through extensive planning and data movement activities.”

In addition, GE Aviation is building out its data lake storage layer using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon Redshift can read and load data simply from Amazon S3, which helps GE Aviation make it available to an even wider number of consumers and additional downstream AWS services. Better access to data is improving the company’s analytics capabilities and making it possible to provide faster and more detailed responses to customers.

Because GE Aviation has many customers with rigorous security regime and works directly with the US government, its architecture needs to comply with strict regulatory controls. The company has strengthened its security posture by using Amazon Redshift Data Sharing to extend the ease of use, performance, and cost benefits of Amazon Redshift in a single cluster to multicluster deployments while being able to share data. And Amazon Redshift Data Sharing is available in AWS GovCloud (US), which gives government customers the flexibility to architect secure cloud solutions that comply with the most stringent US regulations and compliance regimes. “Our hope is to continue innovating at pace but in a way that’s more secure, more compliant, and more governed,” Weidus says. “That’s somewhat unheard of. You typically have to look at those concepts as a trade-off.”

GE Aviation is set to benefit further from its migration to AWS as it utilizes advancements, new releases, and deeper service integrations across the entire AWS data and analytics stack. “Using AWS solutions, we can offer more to our customers, deliver better service-level agreements, and integrate data in place as opposed to moving it,” says Weidus. “AWS has been with us every step of the way, through designing, building, and testing.”

GE Aviation plans to continue its analytics service migration to the cloud. The company sees the potential to expand its data-sharing ability using AWS tools and technology, making it possible to govern holistically and consistently across the entire cloud. “Using Amazon Redshift reinforces what we’re trying to do as an organization,” says Weidus. “We’re trying to make data extremely accessible and usable so that our organization can create on top of it. We’re helping people solve challenges and connect.”