Airlines Suffer Worldwide Delays After Global Booking System Fails (bloomberg.com) 74
rastos1 writes: Airlines worldwide were forced to delay flights Thursday as a global flight-bookings system operated by Amadeus IT Group SA suffered what the company called a "network issue." Major carriers including British Airways, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Cathay Pacific Airways and Qantas Airways were among those reportedly impacted by the outage. Singapore's Changi airport said via Twitter that a technical issue affecting some operators was delaying the check-in process, with boarding passes having to be issued manually. "Amadeus confirms that, during the morning, we experienced a network issue that caused disruption to some of our systems," the Madrid-based company said in a statement. Technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and services are "gradually being restored," it said.
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Good news. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Would cloud hosting have prevented the /. outag (Score:4, Insightful)
AWS has had plenty of outages.
Personally I don't think there is any such thing as "technical issue". There are resourcing, risk management, and personnel management issues. I've built systems with the right teams before that could stand anything short of a nuke, and we came in under budget. Honesty and the right people give you results.
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Every human built system can suffer from technical issues. Saying otherwise is just pretending the problem doesn't exist.
" I've built systems with the right teams before that could stand anything short of a nuke"
You're modest arn't you. Systems always look bullet proof - until they go wrong. I doubt yours are any better or worse than hundreds of others that have been written to be resilient.
Re: Would cloud hosting have prevented the /. outa (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who the fuck is creimer??
Isn't that the guy living next door to Alice?
they don't have local console or able to use ISO (Score:2)
they don't have local console and you are not able to use your own ISO to install an OS.
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Reportedly it was due to equipment failure
If you trust some with the name "Logan, A Bot"...
Re:Good news. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good news. (Score:4, Funny)
I can't believe this hasn't even been addressed on Slashdot. The site was completely down for two days and they're trying to pretend like nothing happened.
But putting the servers back to work hosting slashdot seems to have borked the airline booking service.
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I doubt that. It's obvious that Slashdot shit the bed. They're probably [still] scrambling to figure out what went wrong, and what to fix first. Sourceforge went down too. According to reports "equipment was fried" - which usually means "just reboot" and "restore from backup" is out of the question. Given the nature of SF, I'd bet that was given priority over Slashdot. It's probably a frantic, understaffed scramble that involves emergency purchases and a sudden, unplanned, total migration of *multiple* pro
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Perhaps someone hasn't told you yet.. (Score:2)
... but pushing your pet language in every goddam comments section is a perfect way to make people get sick of hearing about it and give it the finger before they've even tried it. Who knows, perhaps thats your intention. Either way, give it a rest you buffoon.
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Nah. It must be rewritten in Javascript. With Angular.js, Node.js, and a whole load of other *.js's or it won't Web Scale!
SABRE was a classic case study (Score:3)
That would have been 17 Moore's Law generations ago! In human terms, it like looking at the farming methods or weaving techniques or marine navigation procedures or military maneuvers of 1592!
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In my software engineering course, back in the grad school, the SABRE airline reservation system was a case study. Supposed to be a text book example of how to implement and mange the life cycle of complex software systems. I still have the book Software Engineering by Shooman.
That would have been 17 Moore's Law generations ago! In human terms, it like looking at the farming methods or weaving techniques or marine navigation procedures or military maneuvers of 1592!
Back in the day I've dealt with AMADEUS, SABRE and GALILEO. This news sure brings back memories!
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Re:SABRE was a classic case study (Score:5, Informative)
I agree, unfortunately by today's standards, the waterfall approach has it's limitations with respect to time to market and R&D costs. SABRE finally did make it away from the mainframe centric architecture (some time in the later 90's) and thus could adopt more modern life cycle management techniques.
On another note, the SABRE system (American Airlines) was in fact a system that was comprised of the core system originated by Eastern Airlines (named System One) back in the late 70's, early 80's. SABRE and System One added functionality to market these two separate systems to travel agencies who previously had to use telephones to call into an airline reservation centers. System One was later branched off of Eastern Airlines into a separate entity under Continental Holding Co. before Eastern went bankrupt in the early 90's and was later sold to Amadeus. SABRE is still SABRE as far as I know, however Amadeus was the original purchase of System One.
And how do I know this? That was my first job that got me started down the path of computers as well as my distaste for COBOL after C was standardized in 89.
There were actually 4 big ones marketed to the travel industry back in the late 80's
PARS (TWA)
SABRE (American)
DatasII (Delta)
System One (Eastern)
There were other airlines that utilized similar system, Pan Am had "Panamac" ( I think), Continental/America West/Alaska Airlines had "Shares".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Dan
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And in the '80s they gave access to CompuServe Anyone remember EaasySABRE?
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Time to replace (Score:1)
If the whole system is this fragile, it will be more cost-effective to select a stronger platform and development tools, and begin redesigning it now.
I hear that ADA works very well [adaic.com] for building reliable software that doesn't exhibit surprises or unexpected behavior.
Re:Time to replace (Score:4, Interesting)
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...until the manager's flight is canceled, and [s]he is standing in an airport full of people in the same situation, including FAA regulators and Rand Paul.
Then there might be sufficient motivation to refactor.
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ADA... (Score:2)
...is mostly syntax-equivalent with Oracle PL/SQL. The GCC toolchain targets ADA with GNAT. As such, it would obviously link against C.
ADA is quite old [wikipedia.org] and is likely missing many of the features you've outlined. Some of them may be present in the popular descendant of ADA known as SPARK [wikipedia.org].
It is well-known that our software breaks far too much [theatlantic.com]. Denying the problem does not solve it. ADA was designed to address this issue head-on, which is why Boeing's airplane control software is not written in C.
All large systems can be fragile (Score:2)
And it doesn't matter what language they're written in , the fragility generally isn't down to a low level language issue such as memory, threading or pointer issues (though obviously those errors happen too), its usually a logic problem in handling edge cases, unexpected code paths and errors correctly. No language is going to save you from broken logic however much their proponents would pretend otherwise.
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Yes, let's replace a worldwide booking system that for the most part handles 3.7billion passengers every year without issue because of a very occasional outage causing a few queues.
What could possibly go wrong.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Die Hard 4 ? (Score:1)
http://diehard.wikia.com/wiki/... [wikia.com]
My heart goes out to Amadeus (Score:2)
From a person who has had similar international headlines for systems that I can impact. My heart goes out to you. System failures are never fun, failures that affect a lot of customers are just plain stressful. Document processes and learn from this event all the you can. Customers care most what was learned and how to prevent this and future scoped events from occurring again.
Hang in there!