Improving Query Performance by Nearly 70% Using Amazon Redshift with GE Aerospace

GE Aerospace is a global leader in aviation and provides integrated systems for commercial, military, business, and general aviation aircraft. The company has used AWS since 2017, and it has used AWS to complete multiple massive migration projects to migrate out of physical infrastructure and into the cloud. GE Aerospace uses AWS to host many enterprise applications, including its data lake.

The company’s ODS was originally built on the commercial cloud using Amazon Aurora, which has unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. It initially expected its database to require 1–2 TB, but it eventually scaled to almost 6 TB of data using Amazon Aurora. Along with the data increase, GE Aerospace’s near real-time need for the data increased, and its ingestion technologies were causing cache issues, affecting scalability.

Additionally, GE Aerospace wanted to build a digital supply chain strategy for better insights and data analytics. This would involve deprecating several legacy systems and sending even more data to its ODS, potentially tripling its size. The company also needed to be compliant with the cybersecurity maturity model certification, a framework created by the US Department of Defense to help contractors protect sensitive information. This meant the company needed to migrate its ODS from the commercial cloud to a government cloud.

To meet these scalability, performance, and compliance needs, GE Aerospace chose to migrate its ODS application to Amazon Redshift, which companies use to power data-driven decisions with the best price-performance cloud data warehouse. The company was already in the process of migrating its data lake into Amazon Redshift, so it had firsthand experience with the performance of Amazon Redshift, and it consulted with data analytics leaders who had positive experiences with the AWS service.

GE Aerospace accomplished the migration to AWS Redshift through a close partnership with a strategic technology integration partner. The partner played a pivotal role in the project, seamlessly integrating into the team and offering valuable expertise every step of the way. With a deep understanding of AWS services and a proactive problem-solving approach, the partner facilitated a smooth transition, minimizing downtime and maximizing efficiency.

In November and December of 2022, GE Aerospace completed a proof of concept for its ODS migration to Amazon Redshift. “Our proof of concept using Amazon Redshift was successful—everything worked flawlessly,” says Bejoy John, senior director of data analytics at GE Aerospace. This proof of concept was followed by a 9-month multiphase migration process from January to September 2023. When GE Aerospace completed the four phases of its ODS migration, it had successfully migrated over 150 reports and associated procedures, some of which exceed 10,000 lines of code.

The migration of such a large solution was a complex process, and GE Aerospace worked alongside AWS to tackle obstacles that came up. The company also received consultation and recommendations from AWS while planning the migration, including both proactive and reactive support and guidance from the specialist Amazon Redshift engineering team. “The recommendations from AWS about fine-tuning the solution and what capabilities we could use for the cluster were very valuable,” says Bejoy.

By migrating to Amazon Redshift, GE Aerospace estimates it will save over $500,000 in yearly costs, exceeding the company’s initial expectations. In addition to cost savings, the company saw improvements in its query performance by almost 70 percent. “We were seeing queries that used to run for an hour and a half running in 7 minutes using Amazon Redshift,” says Bejoy. The query performance improvements led to productivity gains, improving turnaround times as debugging and defect handling for its ODS application became faster.

To achieve cybersecurity maturity model certification compliance as a supplier to the US Department of Defense, GE Aerospace also migrated ODS data to AWS GovCloud (US), which is designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads and to address the most stringent of US government security and compliance requirements.

Though stability, performance, and compliance benefits were all immediately tangible for GE Aerospace, the migration to Amazon Redshift will also have future benefits for the company. “When we talk about the future, our solution can be readily expanded or be used for other use cases outside of our specific team’s needs,” says Waseem Saleh, senior architect at GE Aerospace. “Using Amazon Redshift, we are more scalable and have unlocked long-term strategic benefits for our solution.”

The initiative undertaken by GE Aerospace's Digital Supply Chain team to use Amazon Redshift follows a strategic investment in Amazon Redshift across the organization. By adopting a data mesh model, the company is empowering its business domains with near real-time data access and laying the groundwork for more responsive and collaborative enterprise data infrastructure thanks to cross-cluster data sharing.

“Migrating to Amazon Redshift was done within time and under budget and saves a huge amount in terms of optimizing data storage,” says Bejoy. “In all directions, it was a big win for all of us.”