As the world’s leading cruise operator, Carnival Corporation is focused on delivering unforgettable happiness to millions of guests annually by providing extraordinary cruise vacations. Faced with the challenge of deploying the latest technology in remote areas with limited connection, the cruise industry has historically faced barriers with digital transformation. Despite its size and scale as a globally distributed business with nine world-class brands and 92 passenger ships, however, Carnival Corporation has managed to put innovation at the forefront to support its employees in reimagining guest experiences.
Ships are floating cities that depend on satellite connectivity to operate, making it critical to have resilient, highly available applications so that Carnival Corporation crews and guests can have enjoyable, seamless interactions onboard. With new advancements in satellite communications, the corporation’s decision to consider a hybrid approach with a blend of on-premises and cloud technologies provides high reliability with the agility and flexibility of the cloud. To unlock new hybrid and multicloud capabilities and make the most of the edge on shore and at sea, Carnival Corporation has been trialing Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and Azure Monitor with two of its cruise line brands, and after a difficult period during the COVID-19 pandemic, the corporation is surging back with its loyal customer base in tow.
“Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc … [have] the potential to provide a strong reduction in the time required to roll out new software to multiple ships.”
Stefano Zunino, IT Architectures and Solutions Director, Carnival Corporation
Bringing cloud-native services on-premises
Carnival Corporation’s diverse brand portfolio brings together some of the most recognized cruise lines in North America, Europe, and Australia, along with a tour company that provides exciting onshore excursions. While its grand presence allows it to reach a wide target market, each brand comes with a unique technological estate, adding complexity to Carnival Corporation’s technology innovation and management. Because each brand continues to own the infrastructure behind its ships, there are both challenges and opportunities with standardizing and streamlined IT operations across the corporation. “Our pace and the way we do things depends heavily on what is best for each brand and what infrastructure is available for us to accomplish something,” says Stefano Zunino, IT Architectures and Solutions Director at Carnival Corporation.
The corporation’s small but mighty maritime and environmental compliance team is tasked with critical fleet and crew management services, including ship construction, maintenance, routing, technical procurement, and crew member training. “As part of our evolving maritime system strategy, we own a suite of applications that collect data from each vessel, bring it to the cloud in real time, and represent it on nautical charts,” says Franco Caraffi, IT Director – Global Maritime and Environmental Compliance at Carnival Corporation. “We then save this data in the cloud for analysis to verify the compliance and efficiency of these applications used in our Fleet Operation Centers.”
The maritime and environmental compliance team wanted a solution that could bring cloud-native capabilities on-premises to ships and give them a consistent operations and management platform that can manage both workloads in Azure and at the edge. “We needed to be able to fully manage these services from ashore in the cloud, but also onboard our vessels,” says Caraffi. “To address this, we wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of a solution that could give us more autonomy with a solid maritime application in a dedicated black box.”
The team selected a pilot vessel from the company’s Costa Cruises brand out of Italy to run Azure Stack HCI as the onboard hardware and software and assess whether it was the right solution from a functional and operational perspective. Quickly realizing positive results on Costa Toscana, the team extended the rollout to another vessel from a second brand, the Seabourn Venture. “Because Azure Stack HCI on Costa Toscana and Seabourn Venture are dedicated to maritime and compliance, we own all the infrastructure and manage the entire stack, so we can proceed with our own pace, priorities, and planning,” says Zunino. The team is now installing the solution on a third ship, Seabourn Pursuit, while regularly evaluating new growth opportunities across each brand.
“We are committed to operating our vessels to the highest standards of health, environmental compliance, safety, and security, and that means having ready access to the most up-to-date and secure data, technology, and tools we need to do our best work,” says Vice Admiral Bill Burke (ret.), Chief Maritime Officer at Carnival Corporation. “The solutions being assessed by our IT pros working with Microsoft ensure both our ship and shoreside teams have greater-than-ever ability to deliver operational safety levels that far exceed industry standards.”
A game-changing approach to highly available applications and on-demand scaling
As Carnival Corporation has migrated its Windows Server and SQL Server workloads to Azure, it also recently began working with a microservice, containerized architecture with AKS, a managed Azure service that the team considers a game-changer for providing highly available applications with on-demand scaling options. “Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Arc allow us to automate the entire end-to-end CI/CD process, so we’re able to install on or update several ships simultaneously and boost our time to market,” says Zunino. “In the past, rolling out a new version of an application across our ships was really painful, but this solution has the potential to provide a strong reduction in the time required to roll out new software to multiple ships.”
Carnival Corporation’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) framework relies heavily on hybrid Azure DevOps instances running on each ship. These instances run alongside automated Azure pipelines, which are used for deploying containers on AKS, and AKS on Azure Stack HCI, all while helping to securely manage sensitive information with Azure Key Vault. To deploy apps directly to its ships trialing this solution, Carnival Corporation uses Azure Arc, which acts as a bridge to extend the Azure platform for consistent development and operation experiences and to run cloud-native apps anywhere and on any Kubernetes platform. The maritime and environmental compliance team uses Azure Arc on its ships to monitor and govern all hybrid cloud resources. “The single pane of glass from Azure Arc is a huge advantage from an operational point of view because of the full view of what we have, including every pod in the Kubernetes environment,” says Franco Cerutti, IT Operation Director at Carnival Corporation. “Our main goal at the outset was to trial technologies that could provide high availability on one side and the benefits of the cloud environment on the other. Azure Arc delivers on all those requirements and provides a number of other related features.”
Carnival Corporation also sought resilient, cloud-connected hardware for its ships. Thanks to Azure Stack HCI and its unified hybrid cloud platform, the corporation’s maritime and environmental compliance team can deploy the same code on shore and at sea using AKS containers. As a result, it has the potential to reduce technology sprawl and spend while still supporting all of its applications, which is especially critical to serve the company’s scale. Carnival Corporation is evaluating AKS on Azure Stack HCI as a consistent container platform and delivery model for more areas of the business.
“We’ve been using Azure since 2015, so Azure Stack HCI was the first option we considered as the natural evolution into a hybrid architecture,” says Zunino. Adds Cerutti, “Azure Stack HCI is easy to manage, and we have full control of the number of cores we dedicate to compute tasks.” It also boasts powerful control plane capabilities and can keep pace with further advances in satellite communications around the world, including greater connectivity and lower latency with new satellite services like Starlink.
Smooth sailing to containerized applications, innovations, and digital twins
One of the maritime and environmental compliance team’s top priorities for containerization was its Neptune application, which tracks the company’s ships and their vital signs as they traverse the world. It previously ran on virtual machines, but the team wanted to have the same platform on its ships as it does in the cloud. Upgrading Neptune and its data collector component using the latest Azure IoT Edge tools marks its first foray into modernizing the collection of Internet of Things (IoT) signals. As those data signals come in, they’re reported in Neptune and the Miami Fleet Operation Center positions all the ships and incoming data feeds on a global map, which also helps the team gain insights to track key performance indicators.
To support its corporate sustainability efforts, the team uses the same tools to collect thousands of signals related to engines and energy production and consumption. This helps the company optimize shipboard energy use and reduce emissions. One of the team’s other goals was to explore new opportunities for innovation related to its core business, and it’s doing that with Azure Digital Twins. The team is testing twins that emulate its ships’ digital environments, giving it more time to experiment before bringing new products and services to market and helping ensure smooth and seamless launches every time.
Carnival Corporation has already used a complete replica of a ship to test projects like its Princess Cruise Line’s award-winning Medallion wearable, which provides fast and easy entry to staterooms, and to test more eco-friendly fuel alternatives. Not only will digital twins in the IT environment enable the team to explore innovations like these, but they will also help the company tap into the full power of data insights with Azure, which are driving the company toward a better, more sustainable future. “Digital agility affects safety now, and we really believe that Azure Stack HCI can support that with IoT and IoT Edge, which we’re using on ships to transmit data in real time from shipside cloud to the Azure cloud platform,” says Caraffi.
Supporting passengers with enhanced infrastructure
Where already deployed, Carnival Corporation’s Azure-based transformations have positively affected the operations and safety of its ships and their crews, and the company’s customers ultimately benefit from more efficient back-end operations, more ships getting to port on time, and fewer disrupted itineraries. And as the Carnival Corporation team gains efficiency, it can focus less on monitoring and management and more on high-value tasks like planning for the future and finding new ways to delight passengers.
“Demonstrating to our colleagues that services like Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc provide real value not only in maritime activities but in further transforming our guests’ onboard experiences has been very gratifying,” says Caraffi. “When our guests have a wonderful experience on a Carnival Corporation ship, it’s the result of enormous behind-the-scenes management that Azure is helping to make happen.”
“Digital agility affects safety now, and we really believe that Azure Stack HCI can support that with IoT and IoT Edge, which we’re using on ships to transmit data in real time from shipside cloud to the Azure cloud platform.”
Franco Caraffi, IT Operation Director – Global Maritime and Environmental Compliance, Carnival Corporation
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