Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NCLH) has migrated its shoreside technology infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The migration process took 15 months to complete and involved moving more than 100 applications, thousands of virtual and physical servers, data center environments, and peripheral server rooms to the cloud.
The core workloads moved include NCLH's reservation system, and mobile apps among others.
"We are thrilled to be at the forefront of cloud adoption in the cruise industry,” said Georgios Mortakis, NCLH chief information officer and chief information security officer, who led the cloud migration process alongside Humberto Pombo, senior director of Infrastructure at NCLH.
"Our migration of on-premises workloads to AWS has resulted in significant improvements in performance. This allows us to accelerate innovation and create amazing experiences for our employees, guests, and travel partners. As an example, during our largest traffic event ever for our reservations systems in November 2023, we handled record volumes without any known performance or availability issues."
In addition, the cruise liner has adopted development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) into its software development processes which facilitates secure coding practices, automates security testing procedures, and mitigates human errors that could potentially expose vulnerabilities.
According to the company, the migration process was not without difficulties. “Meticulous planning by the implementation team, leveraging cutting-edge technologies and innovative strategies to streamline the migration process, and an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ attitude were necessary,” said Mortakis.
Now that the shoreside technology infrastructure is cloud-based, NCLH plans to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further improve its operations, using AWS analytics, machine learning, and generative AI services to enable the prototyping of new services.
NCLH has a fleet of 32 ships which go to 700 destinations worldwide. The company is intending to add 13 ships to its fleet by 2036.
In January 2023, NCLH signed an agreement with SpaceX's satellite Starlink service to provide connectivity to its fleet. The company is one of many cruise liners to have done so, including Hurtigruten, Columbia Shipmanagement, Costamare, and Enesel.
Cruise ship company Carnival Corporation deployed Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, a cloud-to-Edge offering, on three of its ships in July 2023.
