Skyguide Trains Air Traffic Controllers More Efficiently with Puppet

Challenge: High Expectations & Cumbersome Proprietary Tools

Skyguide’s VCT2 Radar Simulator is crucial for training the company’s air traffic controllers (ATCs), providing training for up to 80 ATCs across multiple shifts every day. The tool simulates real-world scenarios, giving trainees practical exposure to the software and tools they’ll need to manage the complexities of air traffic. ATCs use the skills they develop in Skyguide’s training simulator to guide aircraft safely across European skies and to their destinations.

Uptime of the simulator environment is essential: Any failure in the simulation tech could prevent ATCs from finishing their training, which would impact the number of flights Skyguide could safely and effectively manage.

“The simulation has to run stably,” explained Nicolas Fujise, a Senior Project Manager at Skyguide. “Should the simulator not be available due to breakdown during conversion training, air traffic controllers might not be able to finish their session and therefore would not be allowed to work on active operations with the new system. This could cause direct consequences in terms of the air traffic management capacity.”

Skyguide used to develop its own tools to continuously test and deliver configuration code for individual stations in the simulator. Eventually, these tools became too costly to operate, since they required in-house developer resources to maintain and evolve with Skyguide’s needs. And because these tools were created specifically for the simulation environment, deployment packages from other environments couldn’t be reused.

Their custom tooling also lacked the flexibility demanded by their intensive training schedules. The training environment’s configurations need to bechanged several times each day (a typical training session lasts just less than an hour). In some cases, that change only requires updates to the training scenario data. In other cases, all the software needs to be swapped out.

“For example, we have a certain software version for unit training that can be used for five months, because we want to train them in a stable environment,” said Fujise. “Outside of this, we have some implementation projects that require some training of new ATC functionalities with another software version that we need to be able to deploy.”

To quickly configure stations for training, control cost, and introduce reusability across its operations and training systems, Skyguide needed reliable, scalable automation and configuration management.

Results: Smoother Deployment, Shareable Tools & Enterprise Automation

“In order to benefit from a seamless continuous delivery pipeline in all environments … the decision [to use] Puppet was taken at an enterprise level.” 
- Raimund Brandt, Application Deployment Manager, Skyguide

Using Puppet Enterprise, Skyguide set up a continuous delivery pipeline through all training, testing, and production environments (replacing costly in-house tooling). Now, the IT teams can use the same configuration management solution between its production and training systems; deploy faster with less cost per deployment; meet demanding safety requirements; and support ATC training with the ability to add new features to their system quickly.

The VCT2 Radar Simulator environment can range from one simulation with 12 controllers and 12 pilots interacting in the same scenario, to six trainees in six individual training sessions with different configurations. Skyguide needed to be able to configure working positions and allocate a certain version of the software to each with a certain air traffic scenario. Puppet Enterprise’s powerful, scalable automation and configuration management allows even the non-technical members of Skyguide’s team to manage the complex training environment with ease — even with several default configurations in use at any one time.

“All configuration is done by a platform operator, not a technical engineer, so we have an easy-to-use tool with a graphical user interface,” Fujise explained. “This can configure the simulation room and allocate a version of the software and dedicated training scenario data to each working position. When this is done, it defines which version of the application is deployed on which host. All the data is fed into Puppet, and Puppet takes care of changing all these configurations on up to 600 hosts.”

“Using Puppet’s standardized industrial configuration management solution allows us to set up our training sessions dynamically on our new Switzerland-wide radar simulator,” said Fujise. “Beyond our training environment, we have streamlined our new DevOps toolchain based on Puppet Enterprise, reaching from our test environment to our operations and training teams. The solution has played an important role in enabling us to meet the quality, repeatability and insurance rules we must follow for all our training.”

“Instead of concentrating on infrastructure for deployment and configuration, we can focus on [two major concerns],” said Brandt: “The actual code for deployment, and how to extend the deployment solution with Puppet to other environments.”

Puppet Enterprise is built to evolve with organizations at any level of automation maturity. Discover how the flexibility, efficiency, and self-service capabilities enabled by Puppet can advance your IT evolution with a demo — or get in touch with the team to build the perfect Puppet plan for your department and business goals.

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