AWS re:Invent 2025 - [NEW LAUNCH] United Airlines: Operational Excellence with AWS (SPS317)

AWS Unified Operations: Transforming Mission-Critical Operations for United Airlines

Overview

• United Airlines is a 100-year-old organization balancing operations and innovation
• They handle 175 million passengers annually across 360 global destinations and 5,000 daily flights
• United's technology landscape is highly complex, with 2,100 applications, 4,300+ microservices/APIs, and 5 billion daily digital channel hits

Operational Challenges

• Unplanned operational events cost United $13.5 million on average, with each incident taking over 5 hours to resolve
• Traditional incident response processes involve significant time spent detecting issues, engaging the right teams, and troubleshooting root causes
• Even well-designed applications experience failures, which can have cascading impacts on customers, revenue, and compliance

United's Shift-Left Initiatives

• United developed a "Digital Technology Operating Platform" (DTOP) to automate and optimize their software development lifecycle
• Key DTOP capabilities include:
  • Secure code development
  • Automated code quality and vulnerability scanning
  • Standardized, repeatable solution architecture
  • Boundaryless data and consistent engineering practices
• DTOP aims to "shift left" and build in operational excellence and resilience from the beginning, rather than trying to bolt it on at the end

AWS Unified Operations

• AWS Unified Operations is a comprehensive partnership designed to prevent problems, respond to critical incidents in under 5 minutes, and continuously improve operations
• Key components:
  • Proactive guidance through operational readiness reviews with AWS subject matter experts
  • Rapid incident response with 24/7 alerting and context-aware incident management
  • Continuous improvement through workload refinement and proactive assessments
• Integrates people, processes, and tools to align AWS and customer operations:
  • AWS provides incident management engineers and service domain experts
  • Integrates customer incident management and monitoring tools with AWS support
  • Aligns processes for both proactive and reactive operational support

United Airlines' Unified Operations Journey

• Piloted Unified Operations with 4 critical applications: reservation management, airport operations, fleet maintenance, and weight & balance
• 12-week implementation process:
  • Weeks 1-2: Integrated tooling and understood United's operations culture/challenges
  • Weeks 3-4: Performed architectural and operational readiness reviews on the 4 applications
  • Weeks 5-6: Conducted incident response simulations to align teams and processes
  • Week 7+: Began proactive support and continuous improvement
• Key outcomes:
  • 70%+ improvement in mean-time-to-engage for critical incidents
  • Tailored recommendations and application context provided to AWS support engineers
  • Identified architectural improvement opportunities to enhance resilience

Business Impact

• Unified Operations helps United achieve their operational excellence and reliability goals:
  • Reduces mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) by 7%, improving on-time performance
  • Contributes to a 5-point improvement in customer satisfaction (NPS) scores
• Enables United to rapidly fail over critical applications (1,000+ automated cross-regional failovers)
• Provides the foundation for United's shift-left initiatives to build in operational excellence from the start

Conclusion

• United's journey with AWS Unified Operations is just beginning, with plans to expand the program across more critical applications
• The focus is not just on faster incident response, but on proactively identifying and resolving potential issues before they impact customers
• Other enterprises running mission-critical workloads on AWS can benefit from a similar Unified Operations partnership to transform their operations