Ryanair is to move almost all its infrastructure to AWS following a successful migration of some of its IT systems.

The budget airline plans to close the vast majority of its data centres over the next three years. It already runs several core production workloads on AWS, such as Ryanair Rooms and Ryanair.com, and is building a company-wide data lake on Amazon S3, using Amazon Kinesis to gain insights from customer and business data.

The airline is also ditching Microsoft SQL Server in favour of Amazon Aurora to run an email marketing campaigns in Europe in a bid to cut down costs in communicating with its 22 million European subscribers.

“We’ve chosen to work with the world’s leading cloud to develop and deliver services that will transform our customers’ travel experiences. By rebuilding core applications, converting data into actionable insights, and creating intelligent applications, we are putting the solutions in place to continue our leadership in the travel industry,” said Ryanair’s CTO, John Hurley.

It is also working with the AWS ML Solutions Lab to create an application that enables the company to automatically detect surges in demand for flight segments and anticipate schedule changes.

“Machine learning is hugely important to our growth, and we’re pursuing a variety of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to enhance customer UI experience and personalise the myRyanair portal for every unique traveller,” said Hurley.

“We’re currently trialling Amazon Lex to enhance our customer support experience, by intelligently routing customer support requests to the right type of assistance – whether that be a customer support representative or an artificial intelligence-driven interaction.”

Mike Clayville, vice-president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, said the airline’s plans to move to AWS are much like a lot of other enterprise looking to migrate as many of their existing applications as they can as quickly as possible.

“Because we have the most comprehensive set of cloud services, including our leading machine learning and deep learning services, Ryanair will be able to employ those services to drive greater customer and employee satisfaction. We’re excited to help them create first-class experiences on AWS as they continue to use our capabilities and services at an accelerated pace,” he said.