VW selects Mirantis OpenStack to enable DevOps team to deliver software faster

Car maker focuses on agile software innovation as industry shifts towards services

Car maker Volkswagen Group is to use Mirantis as its OpenStack distribution vendor in a bid to enable its developers to build and deliver software more quickly.

According to Mario Müller, Volkswagen's vice president of IT infrastructure, the automotive industry is shifting towards a more services-led model, which has encouraged the company to focus on agile software innovation.

"The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen," he said.

"Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen's developers build and deliver software faster," he added.

The Volkswagen Group is hoping that the open source cloud platform will cut IT costs through standardisation. OpenStack will support internal and consumer-facing apps and will connect people across Volkswagen's brands such as VW, Porsche, Bentley, Skoda and Seat, as well as its dealers and suppliers.

According to Müller, Volkswagen evaluated several major OpenStack distribution vendors using objective criteria across 64 use cases.

"The Mirantis team, using Mirantis OpenStack, demonstrated the best execution rate, at 98 per cent. Mirantis was chosen because it is the only pure-play OpenStack vendor and enables VW to pick any technology around OpenStack at any point in time. That means, VW wants to avoid a vendor lock-in at all costs," he told Computing.

The decision to go with Mirantis forms part of a wider Group IT Cloud Project. Müller pointed to digitalisation, ubiquitous connectivity, social media and big data as reasons for the cloud initiative. He said that the company's traditional IT infrastructure is hampered by its provisioning process.

"It poses many challenges to meeting our new business requirements. There is too much manual work in the process, too much reliance on proprietary hardware and we have a very time-consuming procurement process. It's vertically scalable for application development, but not designed for horizontal scale," he said.

Cloud computing, though, can provide the company with a better approach to horizontal scale. Its advantages, he said, mean that everything is automated and that developers can self-service without going through operations and procurement.

"Our software is increasingly open source and we embrace an agile/DevOps development model," he said.

The company has moved to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and is aiming to have Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) up by July 2016.

Müller said that IaaS services are for administrators and technical competence centres and that they were not designed for end users.

"The IaaS services provide virtualised hardware - computer, networking and storage - running on Linux with root access. Connectivity is via VW's intranet - it's not yet connected to the internet. It doesn't support legacy applications and we don't yet offer central back-ups. It's available to our teams in America, Europe and Asia," he said.

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