For over 40 years, the company has consistently delivered innovative products for widespread manufacturing. One of the largest engineering companies in the world and a leading global technology partner to the automotive industry, the company develops mobility solutions. Millions of vehicles with the company’s software are on the road today.
With over 5000 employees, it brings together the best of different worlds: automotive and IT, hardware and software, products and services. In addition to vehicle and powertrain development, the company focused early on e-mobility, autonomous driving and intelligent connectivity.
At-a-Glance
This customer spotlight highlights an automotive engineering company that develops solutions for tomorrow's mobility and takes on challenging software projects for the automotive industry. To accelerate the development of new applications, the company now relies on cloud native approaches and a container infrastructure based on Kubernetes and Rancher Prime. This allows the engineering company to flexibly provide the necessary resources for innovative services — even in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The company’s customers benefit from faster innovation, platform independence and secure and reliable operations.
The journey to container technology
Data is the fuel for the mobility of the future. In addition to engineering services, the company offers its customers a wide range of digital services and software products. Its measurement data platform, for example, helps automotive manufacturers to evaluate large volumes of vehicle data in real time and make better decisions on this basis. Big data and machine learning technologies make it possible to identify patterns and correlations and derive probable future behavior. In this way, the company can support use cases such as predictive maintenance or contribute to the intelligent control of traffic flows.
"For us today, there is no business without IT," says the company's in-house business consultant. "At the same time, IT is fully focused on driving the business forward.”
The company takes on challenging software projects for its customers, developing both embedded applications and modern apps that interact with vehicle owners. "The proportion of software in cars is constantly increasing and plays a decisive role in the mobility of the future," says the company’s team manager for cloud platform operations. "With more than 800 software developers and decades of experience, we support our customers in successfully shaping the transformation to the software-defined vehicle."
The company still develops some of these applications at the customer's request using traditional waterfall methods. However, the company is increasingly using agile processes and cloud native development tools for its projects.
"The automotive world — and with it the requirements for software products — is changing rapidly today. For this reason, we started working with containerization and Kubernetes as early as 2017. Our goal was to implement new customer requirements more quickly and accelerate the development of innovative applications, without compromising on security and reliability," says the team manager for cloud platform operations.
"In the traditional IT world, it could take weeks before new virtual machines were available for a software project. Today, with Rancher Prime in AWS, we can set up a new Kubernetes cluster in a maximum of 15 minutes — with all the necessary security settings, persistent storage, connection to monitoring, backup configuration and assigned cost center. This is a huge value-add for our teams."
Why Rancher Prime?
After the company gained initial experience with containerized applications and Kubernetes in various projects, the IT team quickly recognized the need for a centralized management platform. Today, the company operates its own development, test and production clusters for each customer project. These run either in the company’s own data center, in the customer's environment or at a cloud provider. The company also uses edge Kubernetes architectures to roll out containerized applications to a fleet of test vehicles.
"This complexity of very different customer environments can only be managed with an overarching management concept and uniform standards and processes," says the team manager for cloud platform operations.
"After comparing various solutions, we finally decided on Rancher Prime as our Kubernetes management platform."
The company chose Rancher Prime for three reasons. First, Rancher Prime supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, including all popular public cloud offerings such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This enables the company to centrally manage hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments.
Second, Rancher Prime provides powerful capabilities to manage users, access rights and security policies uniformly across all environments. This makes it easier to meet the automotive industry's stringent requirements for protecting sensitive data.
"Last but not least, Rancher Prime's intuitive user interface made a strong impression on us, providing a low threshold-to-entry into the world of Kubernetes," reports the company’s team manager for cloud platform operations. "It enables us to provide our developers and customers with the resources they need on our clusters, allowing us to efficiently handle tasks like provisioning, updating, backing up and monitoring the clusters via a central interface."
After implementing Rancher Prime, the IT team quickly expanded its Kubernetes infrastructure. The environment now includes more than 650 individual nodes running a variety of workloads. These include AI and analytics applications, which rely on powerful GPU hardware for fast data processing.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Simplifies container management in hybrid multi-cloud environments
"With Rancher Prime, we can meet a wide range of customer requirements and operating models," said the team manager for cloud platform operations. "Regardless of whether we are developing an individual application for a customer or providing a software platform as a service for various customers, Rancher Prime enables us to operate the required container infrastructure reliably and scale it in a highly flexible manner."
The company started exclusively with on-premises clusters and is now deploying the first Kubernetes clusters with Rancher Prime in AWS. It plans to support other public cloud platforms soon, upon customer request. The ramp-up time is minimal because the company's IT administrators can utilize Rancher Prime’s consistent interface and familiar tools for cluster life cycle management in any environment.
"Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures open up completely new possibilities for our customers," says the company’s team manager for cloud platform operations. "For example, if a car manufacturer needs to review large amounts of vehicle data due to new regulatory requirements, we can quickly provide the necessary resources in the public cloud. With Rancher Prime’s autoscaling capabilities and Kubernetes, we can scale performance up or down as needed.”
Rancher Prime’s flexibility of a multi-cloud strategy will continue to deliver cost benefits in the future. For example, the company will be able to run AI workloads with high performance requirements in the cloud environment with the most cost-effective GPU performance available.
Accelerates service delivery with highly automated operations
Rancher Prime also frees the operations team from manual operational tasks and accelerates the provisioning of resources and new services. Development teams can independently book namespaces on a cluster through the centralized management interface and immediately use these resources for their projects.
The company can provision new clusters in a very short time with Rancher Prime. "In the traditional IT world, it could take weeks before new virtual machines were available for a software project," explains the company’s team manager for cloud platform operations. "Today, with Rancher Prime in AWS, we can set up a new Kubernetes cluster in a maximum of 15 minutes — with all the necessary security settings, persistent storage, connection to monitoring, backup configuration and assigned cost center. This is a huge value-add for our teams."
The team has also been able to automate its cluster upgrades with Rancher Prime. With just a few clicks, the company’s team can update the Kubernetes versions in their environment — or roll back to the previous version if necessary. This makes it easier for the company to keep the environment up to date.
Supports innovation without compromising security
The company works with its customers on the Kubernetes infrastructure to develop cutting-edge projects, such as predictive maintenance. Protecting intellectual property and sensitive corporate data is therefore a top priority.
Rancher Prime's built-in role-based access controls (RBAC) ensures that internal and external users only have access to the clusters and projects they are authorized to access. Working through a simple interface, the company can centrally manage user permissions across the entire environment. Rancher Prime also works with a variety of authentication services, including Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Azure AD, OpenLDAP, GitHub, Okta and Google OAuth.
Maintains high availability of business-critical processes
"With Rancher Prime, we can also rely on the resilience of our environment," says the team manager for cloud platform operations. "Its powerful backup mechanisms ensure continuous data protection, allowing us to quickly restore clusters in the event of an emergency."
What's next?
The transformation of the automotive industry will continue to gather pace in the coming years. This will also increase the pressure on the company to shorten development cycles and make innovations available as quickly as in the field of consumer electronics. Many customers want open systems in their vehicles that can be flexibly expanded with new functions via over-the-air updates.
"With Rancher Prime, we have created the conditions for turning innovative ideas into market-ready software solutions more quickly," says the company's in-house business consultant. "Rancher Prime’s high level of automation and support for hybrid multi-cloud architectures reduce complexity and relieve us of a lot of operational work. This gives us the opportunity to become even more of a creator rather than an administrator."
The company’s team manager for cloud platform operations is also convinced that cloud native approaches and open source technologies will become even more important for the company’s software development. "Our successes with Rancher Prime and Kubernetes shows how important it is to rely on open standards and technologies without vendor lock-in. Rancher Prime and Kubernetes give us the flexibility to provide our customers with the applications that the market currently demands, whether in the cloud, on-premises or edge environments."