Using GitLab, Thales revolutionizes in-flight entertainment with personalized experiences

Thales provides in-flight entertainment systems on more than 2,300 aircraft across 80 airlines, serving more than 1.6 million passengers per day. To take in-flight entertainment (IFE) to a new level, Thales built a groundbreaking system, dubbed FlytEDGE, designed to offer passengers a personalized experience based on their individual preferences. Unlike traditional IFE systems, FlytEDGE is a cloud-based solution focused on bringing operational flexibility, in order to quickly deploy new applications and services onboard. These new services will tailor passenger experience by intelligently recommending content, providing personalized journey information, like luggage tracking and directions to connecting gates, or even allowing passengers to stream their favorite shows and movies using their own streaming subscriptions.

Thales built, delivered and will operate the FlytEDGE system, which won a prestigious 2024 Crystal Cabin Award recognizing in-flight innovations, on GitLab's end-to-end DevSecOps platform. Adopting GitLab in 2018, empowered Thales to streamline their software development processes, improving collaboration, and ensuring robust security measures.

Using GitLab has enabled Thales teams to better collaborate because they were all using the common platform, gaining visibility into projects, sharing documentation, and gaining the ability to pitch in and work together. And while also relying on GitLab's CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and deploy gave them efficiency and speed, using automated features, specifically for merge requests, also gave them a solid boost.

With FlytEDGE, airlines will be able to do a bi-weekly software update on in-service aircraft, which is a frequency 20 times faster than with traditional IFE systems. That speed is a key differentiator for Thales.

The IFE system relies on cloud-based content management, using providers like Amazon Web Services. This ensures the most popular entertainment options, including live sporting events, are available on every plane, using digital distribution and intelligent content curation.

“By using GitLab's platform, we were able to build FlytEDGE much faster and much more securely than we would have been able to without it,” Dubié. “The platform empowered our developers to create a piece of software that is not only critical to our overall business but will transform the way people are entertained inflight. We are happy to partner with GitLab to redefine the travel experience.”

“Before GitLab, everything was disparate,” says Jordan Dubié, chief product owner of Thales' Software Factory, an environment of tools, processes, and best practices to accelerate software production. “That made it impossible to modify our software without understanding different systems. Now, people can contribute to a common system so it's not a problem. And we can scale better.”

All of this is important to Thales' overall business since in-flight entertainment is a major source of revenue for the company, and it could help them capture more business from airlines that want to digitize their on-board experience and maximize their own customer experience.

FlytEDGE is being beta tested in 2024, operating on four aircraft flying domestically in the U.S. Then the system is expected to be operating at scale by the end of 2026.

One of the main reasons Thales migrated to GitLab is because their teams were being slowed down by a cumbersome toolchain made up of long-out-dated, overly customized legacy tools that left members of the development, security and operations teams constrained and working in silos. It also meant developers and security team members were left to handle many tasks, like compliance processes, manually, which took up precious time and energy. The company has trimmed its toolchain by replacing Bitbucket, Jenkins, and Atlassian's Confluence.

To get out of that situation, Thales turned to GitLab's full platform, replacing legacy tools like BitBucket, Jira, and Jenkins. The company still uses a few distinct security tools but they now use them in conjunction with GitLab and its own security capabilities.

“We had challenges with our old tools that were so old that we were not even able to maintain or upgrade them anymore,” says Dubié. “We were stuck in the past and team members, especially new hires, were saying it was weird we were using these old tools. They wanted something different, something better.”

Dubié notes that with teams switching over to GitLab's platform, they were able to centralize their work in one common platform, remove old collaboration barriers, and enable team members to work together, regardless of where they were physically located around the world.

“We used to have a different software team for every different business entity,” he adds. “We had different teams in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Valence, and Paris — on completely separate platforms, using tools that hadn't been updated in three or four years. That was a major obstacle to collaboration and led to inconsistent development environments.”

With different teams unable to work together — for instance, sharing best practices and helping others solve problems they'd already faced — the company suffered from sporadic and slow release cadences, limiting the efficiency of their software delivery pipeline. “In terms of functionality, we were way behind in the market,” says Dubié. Now, that has all changed. Thales notes they eliminated what once was a “heavy backlog” of software updates because their continuous improvements now are eight times faster than before they used GitLab.

And GitLab-based efficiencies also have given Thales one day extra per month, per person of development time. With 5,000 DevSecOps team members onboard, that is a lot of saved time.

Using a single platform has enabled Thales to rectify this troublesome fragmentation, pull developers together to share information and workloads, and create a whole new level of agility and productivity across projects and geographic locations.

“With GitLab, we went from a completely isolated situation to a collaborative environment that enables better communication and coordination among diverse teams,” Dubié adds. “That has allowed us to overcome those previous barriers, improving our productivity and our ability to build and deploy software.”

Olivier Flous, senior vice president of Engineering & Digital Transformation at Thales, notes that it's critical to the company to be able to continuously upgrade their software to ensure they maintain a high level of security. “Speed has become essential to our businesses,” he says. “That means we need to continuously adapt our software and our processing, and that means we need to be able to deliver faster and to deliver continuously. That's a revolution and that's where GitLab, of course, plays a key role for us.”

Using the platform also has enabled Thales to take advantage of automation, whether it involves security, CI/CD pipelines, documentation, or compliance processes. “Having GitLab's platform has allowed us to really embrace automation,” says Dubié. “It's been key to not just adding shortcuts to so many different workflows but to freeing up our developers from repetitive, manual tasks so they can focus on being innovative. It also has improved the overall developer experience.

“We're betting everything on automation,” he adds.

Thales has set up a lot of automation around its CI/CD pipelines, which has added consistency and reliability, as well as speed and efficiency, giving them faster release cycles and reducing their time-to-market.

By setting up standardized, shared automation tools, such as GitLab Runners that execute jobs in a defined pipeline, team members are able to spin up projects faster, get to work on them, and move through the entire software development lifecycle more efficiently.

The company also is relying on the platform's automated security capabilities, such as secret detection, software composition analysis, static application security testing, and dynamic application security testing. Thales's teams also are able to use GitLab with other tools, giving them a flexibility they didn't have before. Dubié also notes that having security testing already in place whenever a new merge request is opened gives them a new confidence and enables them to create and deploy secure software more easily and efficiently. And by saving them from having to do more frequent audits, it saves them both time and money.

“Having all of these automated security features integrated on GitLab ensures that all of our teams and projects have the same high level of protection, giving us early vulnerability detection, continuous monitoring, and scalability,” says Dubié, noting that they also use GitLab's Trust Center, an interactive portal that provides compliance and assurance credentials and documentation.

“It has really impressed a lot of our team members that they now have the ability to move so fast in the pipelines,” he adds. “They were accustomed to it being a complex and slow setup, and now it's not. We went from days of setting up an environment to just a couple of minutes or hours.”

Though Thales hasn't yet adopted GitLab Duo, a suite of AI-powered features that organizations use to develop and deploy secure software faster, Dubié says team members are eager to start using it. “We are looking closely at GitLab's AI roadmap and the AI capabilities in Duo because it will be key to our future,” he adds. “There's a lot of interest because we know it will streamline our development and delivery, helping us find, analyze, and fix bugs.”

Using GitLab's automation has helped Thales not only effortlessly meet compliance requirements, but prove that they are doing it, as well. Since Thales works in the highly regulated defense, space and transportation industries, the company has to meet an ever-changing list of mandates, such as ISO 27001, an international information security standard. GitLab helps Thales stay compliant by offering tools that automatically ensure the proper setup of development environments, set up guardrails around data locations, tag data, and keep track of information, like vulnerabilities found and fixed.

“Throughout the company, we have multiple levels of data sensitivity so remaining compliant is a complex operation. GitLab helps us do that,” says Dubié. “It's not just about meeting mandates but being able to prove, on a moment's notice, that you're doing what needs to be done. It's easy to impress someone sometimes, but we need to be able to show proof of our compliance every time. Now we have the processes and documentation to do that.”

Dubié notes that Thales, which is building nearly all of its new software with GitLab, is still working to fully automate their compliance system but says they are well on their way. The company also is looking ahead to digitizing their avionics work, and they'll be relying heavily on GitLab to do that since the platform's user interface makes it easy for team members, specifically those who are not developers, to more easily understand and use configuration management. That brings a sense of confidence across teams and departments.

“Our collaboration with GitLab is based on mutual respect and has been very fruitful for us,” says Flous. “We listen to what they tell us, in terms of their vision and in terms of software craftsmanship that we can integrate into our workflow. Thales is a very large company and our mission is to build a future we can all trust. And we're doing that by partnering with GitLab.”