Automating builds and deployments for the VW Group: A revolution in application management

Volkswagen Group, a global leader in the automotive industry, faced the challenge of effectively managing and deploying its applications. Aspecta designed and implemented an innovative solution that transformed their software development and deployment processes.

Key points:

✓ Volkswagen Group faced inefficient and slow application deployment processes.
✓ Aspecta implemented an automated solution based on Concourse CI.
✓ Automated scanning increased security and process standardization.
✓ The solution enabled better integration of applications with AWS services.
✓ The project resulted in faster deployment, cost savings, and improved stability.

08. September 2024 ┃ 7 minutes reading

In today's rapidly changing technological environment is the effective management and deployment of applications is the key to maintaining competitiveness. The automotive industry, known for its complexity and high demands on the quality, not the exception. Traditional approaches to the development and deployment of software often cannot keep up with the requirements for speed and flexibility. Modern trends tend to automation, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and use of cloud technologies.

Client

Volkswagen Group, one of the world's largest automotive manufacturers, is known for its innovation not only in the field of automobile production, but also in support of the IT processes. With an extensive portfolio of brands and a global presence requires the Volkswagen Group is robust and scalable IT solutions to support their operations.

The Issue

Volkswagen Group faced several key challenges in the area of administration and deployment of applications:

Inefficient and time-consuming processes build and deployment applications.
The lack of standardisation between the different teams and projects.
Limited ability to respond quickly to changes and demands of the market.
The difficulty of ensuring consistent quality and safety applications.
The need for better integration with modern cloud services.

These challenges have led to a lengthening of the time of introduction of the new features on the market, the increased cost of development and maintenance, and potential safety risks.

The Volkswagen Group has set the following goals for the project:

Create a highly automated system for build and deployment of applications.
Implement standardised processes across all development teams.
To improve the security of applications through automated security scans.
To reduce the time required to deploy new versions of applications.
To ensure smooth integration with AWS services.
To increase the efficiency and productivity of development teams.

Migration Process and Strategy

Aspecta proposed a comprehensive solution based on the Concourse CI, which addressed all the key requirements of the Volkswagen Group. This solution included:

An automated system build and deployment: We have created a system that, on the basis of the configuration file in the format of the YAML automatically performs the entire process from build applications after its deployment. This process includes a build from the source code, packaging with the selected base image, security scan, generate documentation, deployment into the development environment and the post-deployment tests.
Scalable infrastructure: The entire solution is built on the Concourse CI, which is deployed through autoscaling groups defined in CloudFormation. This ensures high availability and the ability to scale according to the actual needs.
Standardisation and flexibility: Plumber team manages the pipeline templates and Helm chart, which are used to create the build and deploy pipeline for each application. This ensures consistency across projects, but also allows the flexibility for the specific needs of individual applications.
Integration with AWS services: The solution enables the seamless integration of applications running in Kubernetes announcements observed with other AWS services such as SNS/SQS, S3, Elastic Search and EFS.
Safety and quality: Automated security scans are integrated into the pipeline, which ensures that each version of the application undergoes a thorough safety inspection prior to deployment.

The implementation of the new system has brought the Volkswagen Group significant advantages:

✓ The dramatic acceleration of the process of development and deployment: The time required for the build and deployment of applications has decreased.
✓ Increased security: Automated security scans detect and enable the fix potential vulnerabilities before deployment.
✓ Better standardization: All teams now use consistent processes, which simplifies the co-operation and maintenance.
✓ Increased the productivity of the developers: Automation of routine tasks allow developers to focus on innovation and development of new features.
✓ Improved integration with AWS: Applications now more effectively use the cloud services, which leads to better scalability and performance.

Results

The implementation of the FinOps approach and the optimization of Kubernetes clusters have yielded significant results for the VW Group:

✓ Savings on CPU and memory
CPU and memory expenses were reduced by tens of percent, resulting in monthly savings of tens of thousands of EUR.

✓ Improved performance and stability
Applications running on the CaaS platform are now more stable and performant.

✓ Better insight into resource usage
Teams gained more efficient tools for capacity planning and faster deployment of new services.

✓ Positive impact on organizational culture
Teams began actively optimizing resource usage, leading to increased overall efficiency of VW Group's IT operations.

Conclusion

Project automation builds and deployments for Volkswagen Group represents a significant step forward in the field of messaging applications in the automotive industry. Implemented a solution not only streamlined processes of development and deployment, but also had laid out the foundations for future innovation.

The key impacts of the project include:

Significant acceleration of the time of introduction of the new features on the market
Increased safety and quality of applications
Improved scalability and flexibility of the IT infrastructure
Increased productivity of the development teams

On the basis of the experience from this project, we recommend:

Consider purchasing a supported version Concourse CI for faster solution of possible problems.
Transfer from EC2 instance based Concourse on the ECS or Kubernetes based for faster scaling workeros.
Implement stronger enforcement of standards and regular repackagu applications to maintain the freshness and safety of the system.

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