Navigating the future: Schiphol Airport's journey to shift-left platform engineering

At the OpenShift Commons gathering in Amsterdam at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon earlier this year, attendees got a front-row seat to the digital transformation of one of the world's most complex hubs. Roel Donker, Technology Lead within Royal Schiphol Group, joined Maxim Burgerhout, Principal Account Solution Architect at Red Hat, to discuss how the airport is utilizing Red Hat OpenShift to prepare for a "hybrid future."

Image 1: Roel Donker, Technology Lead within Royal Schiphol Group, joined Maxim Burgerhout, Principal Account Solution Architect at Red Hat speaking at the OpenShift Commons Gathering in Amsterdam.

The vision: Schiphol 2050

Schiphol is an Amsterdam landmark, and it's also a global engine for the Royal Schiphol Group, which includes airports like JFK terminal 4 in New York and Brisbane in Australia. With 70 million passengers transferring through Amsterdam last year alone, the stakes for operational excellence are sky-high.

Schiphol’s "Vision 2050" aims for a seamless passenger experience, where travelers can walk straight to their gate without stopping. Achieving this requires an autonomous airport powered by self-driving luggage vehicles, automated passenger bridges, and AI-driven traffic management.

The challenge: Security in a high-stakes environment

Operating a "city" of 65,000 workers comes with massive data and security hurdles. Donker highlighted several critical challenges:

• Data sovereignty: Dutch defense regulations mandate that biometric and mission-critical data remain on-premise and not in a public cloud.
• Massive data ingress: With 4,000 cameras across the airport and highways, Schiphol processes approximately 1 petabyte of data daily.
• Rising threats: The airport saw a 120% increase in cyberattacks last year, necessitating a  more proactive security posture.
• Developer friction: Developers faced a complex web of disconnected security dashboards, leading to "alert fatigue" and slowing down innovation.

The solution: A private hybrid platform

To solve these challenges, Schiphol implemented a hybrid cloud strategy using Red Hat OpenShift. This allows the airport to run consistent environments both in their on-premise data centers for sensitive data and in Azure Red Hat OpenShift for other workloads as the need arises.

A key pillar of this strategy is shifting security left. By integrating Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, Schiphol has automated the scanning of all external images before they ever reach the internal repository. Key components of the Schiphol stack include:

• Red Hat OpenShift: The core application runtime service for both commercial off-the-shelf and self-built applications.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes: Used as a managed service to monitor the software development life cycle by building security into the build, deploy, and runtime workflows with consistent vulnerability management and policy guardrails.

Proven results: Speed and manageability

The shift to platform engineering and managed services has allowed a small team of just seven engineers to manage a massive footprint, including 1,800 deployments and 400 namespaces.

By adopting Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes as a managed service, the technical setup was operational within a single week. Now, onboarding new teams with full security enforcement takes only hours compared to the weeks it required in the past.

Moving forward

Schiphol continues to push toward its 2050 goal by centralizing platform management to reduce the total cost of ownership and bake industry-leading cybersecurity into every building block. As Donker noted, the goal is to move security from a bottom-up developer struggle to a top-down organizational standard that ensures every passenger's journey remains safe and seamless.

Want to see the full technical breakdown of Schiphol’s hybrid strategy?

• Watch the on-demand session from OpenShift Commons Amsterdam: Shift-left platform engineering for Schiphol’s Hybrid Future
• Ready to modernize your infrastructure? Learn how Red Hat OpenShift can fuel your organization’s innovation