United Airlines Improves Developer Productivity by 40% with AWS and Harness

In 2022, United Airlines announced its “United Next” initiative, which embraces innovation and business transformation to better serve its customers. United has a goal of modernizing 80 percent of its workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As United moved from tens to hundreds of applications on AWS, teams faced constraints because of traditional, manually intensive approaches to deployments. With Harness, an AWS Partner, United was able to reduce 70% deployment resources, freeing up valuable resources for more innovative work. United also improved developer productivity by 40 percent by automating deployment pipelines. The result was a 75% increase in deployment rates.

In April 2023, United Airlines became the largest airline in the world based on available seat miles, a key metric of industry performance. United is accomplishing their unprecedented growth by executing their United Next strategy introduced in 2022. With this strategy, the airline aims to become the world’s largest and most loved airline – “The Airline customers choose to fly.” It plans to do this by putting customers’ experiences at the center of technology, people, and operations. Along with modernizing and growing its fleet, the United Next initiative includes elevating customer experience, improving operational excellence, and reducing costs by $2 billion while also reducing carbon emissions.

As part of its innovative path forward, United is transforming 80 percent of its workloads into microservices on AWS to improve their operations, customer experience, and ability to scale applications to meet the needs of their growing customer base.

United’s legacy technology infrastructure and technical debt was hindering the airline from getting its wheels up on its innovation. Although the modernization to AWS was helping, legacy approaches to managing infrastructure and deployments were still impeding productivity of development teams. Developers at United were spending hefty amounts of time fixing and deploying code rather than writing it. The reality was that an average of 30 United developers needed to have hourly availability to manage and maintain its development and production deployment environments. Additionally, these teams spent 2-3 days a week on manual deployment tasks, deprioritizing innovation, coding, and migration.

As Robert Heitzler, principal client executive at AWS explains, “In my seven years of experience at AWS, I’ve seen companies like United eventually hit a point where skilled human capital becomes the primary constraint as they continue to scale their modernization to the cloud. Smart companies, like United, will need to proactively find ways to improve productivity through reuse and automation while continuing to hire and train staff.”

After a thorough evaluation, United chose AWS Partner Harness to help with its digital transformation. Andrew Ziverts, central director of large enterprise sales at Harness, describes Harness as an end-to-end software delivery platform that eliminates “the worst part of a developer’s job” with automation and machine learning. Ziverts goes on to explain, “Our aim at Harness is to make developers and engineers as productive and efficient as possible by improving velocity and quality, providing additional governance, and driving efficiency across the board.”

Harness simplifies development with a modular approach that supports repeatable processes and standards and eliminates the need for disparate tools. Using Harness, United accelerated productivity and innovation by enabling engineers to concentrate on writing new code, rather than managing development and production environments.

By being all in with AWS in its migration efforts, United was not only significantly reducing infrastructure costs for high resiliency but also modernizing application development. To that end, it was using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), as well as Amazon Lambda services. Within a few months, United was accessing enterprise-level support from Harness with templates, shift-left security, and a policy engine. In fact, Maximillian Printz, senior enterprise customer success manager at Harness, says “Implementation at the enterprise level was quicker than normal and went very smoothly because United was so well-integrated with AWS.”

United has seen a 40-percent improvement in development productivity since beginning its collaboration with Harness. According to Ziverts, “A majority of United’s development time before Harness was actually spent on changing manual processes, so a lot of the development team’s time was spent not coding and not innovating. Through the use of automation and leveraging machine learning within our platform, Harness has given them time back.”

A 75 percent increase in deployment rates also contributed to the rise in development productivity. Harness gave United the resources to scale its cloud deployments with more resiliency. United’s development teams went from needing 10 people to verify if a deployment was successful to one person – a 99% reduction in team overhead – because the airline leveraged the consistent and repeatable CI/CD deployments Harness offers.

Harness prioritizes security from the beginning of the software development process, taking a shift-left approach. This approach moves security to the development sphere, but because of the templates Harness provides, security and governance are baked in. Developers do not have to check if code is secure, and security teams can focus on prioritizing other workloads. With this approach and the Harness templates, United went from managing thousands of pipelines to 20 at the most.

United not only saves time in the present but also gains visibility of any potential security vulnerabilities as early as possible – preventing larger, future problems. A simplified and fortified security system ultimately supports one of the goals of the United Next initiative which is to keep unit costs under control while enhancing customer experiences. “We wanted to concentrate more on innovation and moving things to the cloud,” said Ratna Devarapalli, director of IT - architecture, platform engineering & DevOps at United Airlines. “We also wanted to ‘shift left’ and put governance in the hands of developers during the build process.”

Harness is a consultative company and is consistently in conversation with United through office hours, lunch-and-learn meetings, progress tracking, and feedback processes on roadmap items.

With the support of Harness, the airline has been able to simplify, accelerate, and optimize costs for its migration to and broader digital transformation on AWS. In fact, there are currently more than 200 applications in production and twice that in the pipeline with a target to be in production within the next 18 months.