Continental Evolves Manufacturing with Kubernetes

“Transforming large manufacturing organizations like Continental is a huge technical and philosophical challenge. The emphasis is on finding the most intuitive and efficient way to modernize while maintaining competitive advantage. Kubernetes and Rancher will help us achieve this.” Roland Paxián, Manufacturing Infrastructure Team Lead, Continental

When you think of Continental, you might think of tires – but this nearly 150-year-old company has come a long way since its origins as a rubber products manufacturer. Today, Continental is one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world, offering technologies and services for sustainable and connected mobility of people and goods.

Adopting Cloud-Native and Containers for Agility

Continental has always been a forward-thinking organization and, naturally, digital transformation and modernization are major preoccupations. When containers emerged, the team saw an opportunity to streamline infrastructure management and started to investigate. The primary driver for adopting a cloud-native, container-centric strategy was to transform Continental’s manufacturing infrastructure into an agile, cloud-native and platform-based architecture. It had to be heterogeneous – flexible enough to run on-premise and cloud workloads together with any vendor, via a central UI.

The team evaluated several Kubernetes management options, and Rancher emerged as the most suitable platform to help modernize and unify Continental’s legion of manufacturing applications. Since Rancher’s selection in late 2019, growing demand has come from Continental’s many manufacturing teams. In just six months, the team rolled out the platform to three regions and nine manufacturing locations in Europe and Asia – with plans to launch in 45 more locations before the end of the year.

Continental’s containerization strategy has had a marked impact. By working together under a common methodology, teams complete projects faster and developments are consistent and created according to defined rules. With Rancher, Continental has reduced both migration time and upgrade time by 80 percent. Read the full case study to hear more about their transformation with Kubernetes.