Success Story
CAE boosts efficiency of flight services with Red Hat OpenShift
Overview
CAE is on a mission to deliver cutting-edge training, simulation, and critical operations solutions to prepare aviation professionals and defense forces for the moments that matter. It trains approximately 135,000 pilots annually and supports 15,000 flights daily with in-flight service management. That’s about 1 flight every 5 seconds. CAE's immersive flight simulators are highly regarded and widely used in the industry. As the undisputed leader in pilot training, CAE's simulators are trusted by many commercial airlines to ensure the highest standards of safety and proficiency.
As a company, CAE has standardized development across its hybrid, multicloud environment, increasing developer experience and accelerating innovation with self-service capabilities and built-in security. As an organization, it oversaw these changes with the support of Red Hat® OpenShift®, on premise and in the cloud.
- INDUSTRY
Aerospace - REGION
North America (NA) - HEADQUARTERS
Montreal, Québec, Canada - SIZE
13,000+ employees
Challenge
Reimagining the potential of pilot services
Innovation is at the heart of everything CAE does, supporting continuous improvements in customer experiences and streamlining operations. The Montreal-based company wanted to unite application development across its training, flight simulator, and aviation software businesses on a single platform, reducing operating costs and optimizing time to deployment. Take, for example, their simulator. It’s traditionally been a standalone product, but CAE wanted to integrate it into a connected, personalized experience that uses advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, digital immersion, and intelligent pilot and crew applications, to support pilots throughout their training with the company.
With a complex environment spanning cloud, hybrid, and on premise systems, CAE focused on simplifying, standardizing, and automating processes to allow its 2,000 developers and engineers to focus on real-world problem-solving.
Solution
Standardizing development with a cloud-agnostic platform
CAE needed a cloud-agnostic development platform with enterprise-standard support to reach faster application deployment and optimization. In collaboration with Red Hat Services, CAE implemented Red Hat OpenShift—an industry-trusted platform—to manage the cloud-native development of its microservices. Red Hat OpenShift was utilized for on-premise environments while using Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS for fully managed cloud solutions.
“We have 12 clusters across 7 regions, with Red Hat OpenShift standardizing the developer experience regardless of whether it's on premise or in the cloud. We’ve streamlined workflows and equipped developers to self-serve with built-in tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), reusable templates, and automated security policies,” said Rafael Belanger, Platform Lead, CAE.
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes were used to monitor workloads and their performance across all environments, helping to identify potential issues earlier in development. With nearly 2,000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux® servers, CAE automated infrastructure management through Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform, improving efficiency and ensuring smooth operations across its systems.
Software & Services used by CAE
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS
Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
With a standardized approach to coding, deployment, and operations, our engineers and developers can focus on creating innovative solutions to real-world problems, rather than managing infrastructure and security.
Business outcome
Empowering developers to innovate at speed
With Red Hat OpenShift, CAE provided its developers with a consistent, streamlined platform with automated security and compliance policies. By embracing automation in their internal development process, teams accelerated their time-to-market and increased the frequency of releases. As a result of using Red Hat solutions, the flight simulation and training company identified and resolved security vulnerabilities earlier in the pipeline to prevent delays and reduce risks.
CAE has reduced infrastructure costs and management overhead by taking a managed service approach to Red Hat OpenShift, standardizing processes and fostering collaboration across IT teams.
Looking ahead, CAE is exploring a collaboration with Red Hat on a proof of concept to virtualize key processes using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, further reinforcing their infrastructure and driving transformation.
We have 12 clusters across 7 regions, with Red Hat OpenShift standardizing the developer experience regardless of whether it's on-premise or in the cloud. We’ve streamlined workflows and equipped developers to self-serve with built-in tools with automation (CI/CD), reusable templates, and automated security policies.
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