How BMW Powers 1K Microservices And +12 Billion Requests Daily With AWS
And an inside look at the AWS services they use to provide a stellar customer experience.
In our day and age, integrating technology with our vehicles is crucial to enhance driving experiences and safety of drivers.
There’s no better way to achieve this than with the cloud.
The BMW Group works closely with AWS to raise the bar on customer experience and vehicle entertainment.
The luxury vehicle company uses AWS to provide incredible experiences such as automated driving features, cloud data hub, AI personal assistant features, on-board Fire TV, and many more connected vehicle features.
The Numbers
Let’s take a look at the numbers which demonstrates the power that the AWS cloud provides for BMW.
With the help of AWS, BMW is able to achieve:
Over 20 million connected vehicles on the cloud
12 billion requests per day from vehicles alone
1000+ microservices in their IT infrastructure
Process 110TB of traffic data per day
99.95% reliability
The last 2 are nothing short of impressive. With 99.95% reliability, BMW provides a seamless customer experience at all times.
Processing 110TB of data per day requires massive scalability, which AWS provides without fault.
On the development side, BMW has 8.5K developers working on its infrastructure and they push 110 thousand builds (features or fixes) per day on 60 thousand virtual CPUs on the cloud.
In their infrastructure, BMW makes use of 60 thousand EC2 instances to power their massive computational needs daily.
Next, let’s take a look at the AWS Services BMW uses.
AWS Services
BMW uses many AWS services for computing, data storage and machine learning, here are some of the most used ones:
Amazon EC2 for virtual development and for its infotainment systems
Amazon SageMaker for its machine learning-powered automated driving platform
Amazon Redshift as a data lake for its Cloud Data Hub
Amazon Alexa for voice control
Amazon S3 to store its files
Amazon Athena to run queries against the data stored on S3
BMW’s Advanced Driver Assitance
One of BMW’s most notable uses of the cloud is the advanced driver assistance system which transforms the experience and comfort of its vehicles.
The driver assistance system gathers data on speed limits, surrounding vehicles, lane markings, and GPS and navigation data for security and customer experience.
This system can intelligently apply brakes, adjust acceleration and execute steering maneuvers to avoid collisions and eases the driving experience in challenging situations. [3]
These advanced features are powered and maintained by AWS. The intelligent systems use Amazon Sagemaker while the data that is constantly being exchanged and stored is handled by EC2 instances and Redshift, on the cloud.
The voice controlled and assistant feature uses Amazon Alexa.
The Advantages Of The Cloud
To run its IT infrastructure in its own data centers would mean spending heavily on upfront costs for BMW.
It makes it much harder to experiment and guess the required capacity of servers, storage, databases and compute power.
Using AWS, BMW eliminates all of that guesswork and provides resizable compute capacity and unlimited resources at a moment’s notice.
Here’s what Stephan Durach, vice presidents of technical operations at BMW said about the company’s journey on AWS:
Automotive product complexity is strongly increasing and development speed is essential. Using a broad relationship across Amazon and AWS, we are providing game-changing vehicle entertainment experiences, mastering data, and accelerating the development cycle across the entire portfolio from BMW to MINI to deliver best-in-class experiences to our customers. [1]
With the services of the AWS cloud, BMW is empowered to run operations at scale, remain highly available and offer the most reliable experience for its customers with its innovative use of the cloud.
Conclusion
BMW’s collaboration with AWS exemplifies how leveraging advanced cloud technology can revolutionize the automotive industry. By integrating AWS services, BMW not only enhances driving experiences and safety but also ensures performant and scalable operations.
The impressive metrics — over 20 million connected vehicles, 12 billion daily requests, and processing 110TB of data daily — demonstrates AWS’s capability to support BMW’s large IT infrastructure which consists of over 1000 microservices. With 99.95% reliability, BMW provides a near-flawless experience to its customers.
The advanced driver assistance systems, AI-powered features, and seamless voice control further demonstrate how AWS’s cloud solutions are critical in driving BMW’s innovation and operational excellence.
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