How Aeroméxico transformed its business in the cloud

Aeroméxico faced several critical technology challenges associated with its legacy datacenter infrastructure:

• Slow speed to market: Manual processes delayed digital product launches.
• Limited scalability: On-premises hardware constrained the throughput of key applications, creating bottlenecks that impacted resilience.
• Application complexity: With approximately 350 applications to migrate, Aeroméxico needed a multi-faceted strategy that accounted for varying levels of application criticality (Tier 0 through Tier 3) and differing modernization requirements.
• Cybersecurity gaps: Vulnerabilities in legacy systems required urgent resolution.
• Operational continuity: 24/7 airline operations demanded zero downtime during migrations (limited to 90-minute nightly windows).
• Lack of observability: Limited visibility into its workloads made it difficult to identify patterns, anticipate problems, or resolve issues efficiently.
• Skills gap: The IT team needed to be upskilled to operate effectively in a modern, cloud-native environment.
• Obsolescence risk: Three data centers faced hardware expiration, necessitating costly upgrades.

Aeroméxico understood that simply lifting and shifting existing applications to the cloud would be insufficient. A deeper, more strategic transformation was required — one that would modernize applications through re-architecture, re-engineering processes, and evolving the entire IT organization.

Aeroméxico adopted a single-cloud strategy, selecting AWS as its sole cloud partner based on its recognized cloud leadership position, customer obsession, and the fact that it would accompany the airline along all steps of the journey. AWS's philosophy of deep customer focus aligned with Aeroméxico's own commitment to putting customers first. The airline needed a partner that would understand its unique challenges, including gaps in internal cloud skills and knowledge, and help it build capability over time. With access to a comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, Aeroméxico could pursue a true modernization strategy rather than a simple migration. Recognizing that the journey would be complex, Aeroméxico valued AWS's commitment to providing sustained support.

Aeroméxico embarked on a four-year cloud modernization journey with a clear strategic vision. Rather than optimizing for short-term cost savings, the airline prioritized long-term agility, innovation capacity, and operational resilience.

Aeroméxico’s modernization effort encompassed three pillars:

• Application modernization: Re-architecting applications based on criticality tiers. Tier-zero and tier-one critical applications were rearchitected into microservices, leveraging serverless technologies such as AWS Lambda to shift from traditional batch processing to real-time, event-driven architectures.
• Process transformation: Modernizing internal workflows and IT delivery processes to take full advantage of cloud-native capabilities and accelerate development cycles.
• Team upskilling: Investing in the development of internal talent, with AWS helping to build cloud expertise across the IT organization.

Aeroméxico leveraged over 70 various AWS services throughout the journey including serverless architectures, resilient through multi-Region including AWS Lamba and the use of various AWS services as building blocks that allowed us to add advanced capabilities to the operation. To preserve states between event executions, it stores data in Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon S3 for resilience and low access latency.

As the airline approached the fourth year of its journey, a pressing challenge emerged. Its three on-premises data centers were reaching a critical inflection point: aging hardware and expiring service agreements demanded significant capital reinvestment — an investment the company was unwilling to make given its cloud-first direction.

Addressing Remaining Workloads On-premises

Not all applications warranted the same depth of modernization. While mission-critical systems were fully re-architected, many applications still ran in VMware environments on-premises. Aeroméxico needed a way to move these workloads to the cloud quickly, without the time and effort of full re-architecture, while still gaining the benefits of cloud infrastructure.

When a major technology refresh accelerated the timeline, Aeroméxico's infrastructure team identified Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) as the solution to address remaining on-premises infrastructure including workloads that would otherwise take up to 12 months to migrate through traditional methods. The decision to adopt Amazon EVS was driven by speed — Amazon EVS was the fastest path to relocate these workloads to the cloud without the need to make changes to the applications. The infrastructure team could execute Amazon EVS migrations independently, freeing application development teams to continue their refactoring work on critical systems. Amazon EVS enabled Aeroméxico to migrate virtualized applications directly to AWS, maintaining its existing VMware environments while immediately gaining cloud-native benefits such as scalability, resilience, and security.

The Amazon EVS migration was executed with meticulous planning: All migrations were performed at night within a strict 90-minute window to avoid any impact on airline operations. VMware HCX was used to stretch on-premises networks into AWS, enabling seamless workload mobility without IP changes, and the infrastructure team worked closely with business partners to understand application dependencies and prioritize migration waves. The airline identified some applications to retire because some of the features will go to another application that it has already modernized.

Key benefits of Aeroméxico’s Amazon EVS deployment include:

Rapid migration: 35 applications were migrated in the first 30 days, with 96 servers and 50 applications moved to the cloud in approximately 60 days.

Business continuity: Maintained existing VMware operations, tools, and skill sets, while tapping into cloud benefits.

Avoided capital expenditure: The migration eliminated the need for costly, unsustainable on-premises hardware reinvestment.

Immediate scalability: Applications that had been constrained by fixed on-premises hardware capacity were able to scale freely in the cloud, unlocking greater throughput.

Enhanced security posture: Amazon EVS removed the operational burden of patching vulnerabilities and maintaining security updates on virtualization infrastructure — tasks that had previously required significant effort.

Improved reliability: Cloud-based infrastructure delivered greater resilience and availability compared to the aging data center environments.

Improved performance: multiple workloads and applications demonstrated noticeably faster performance after migration to AWS, generating positive feedback from internal customers and end users.

Customers are at the heart of Aeroméxico's transformation. The airline focused its modernization efforts on improving every touchpoint of the travel journey including booking, pre-travel, day of travel, in-flight and airport experience.  The Aeroméxico mobile app, used by millions of customers, became a flagship example of the transformation's impact: Customers consistently recognize the app as faster, more intuitive, and feature-rich — a tangible reflection of the airline's investment. "Customers recognize how they see Aeroméxico as much more modern, much more of a technology company," observed Rocha.

After four years of modernization, with approximately 90% of applications migrated and modernized in the cloud, Aeroméxico has achieved results that significantly exceeded initial projections:

Observability was an unexpected but significant benefit. The airline now has a comprehensive understanding and control of every workload, enabling the team to identify patterns, anticipate problems, and resolve issues far faster than was previously possible.

Aeroméxico views its journey as entering a new chapter. The airline is now embracing AI —­­­­­­­­­ for example, developer teams have adopted Kiro to accelerate agility and speed up delivery of new business requests. “We are a 91-year-old company, and each year, we feel the company is younger than before," concluded Rocha.