RED HAT OPENSHIFT HELPS PORSCHE INFORMATIK DELIVER AUTOMOTIVE INNOVATION FASTER
Porsche Informatik, the IT service provider for the Volkswagen Group, needed to speed application development and delivery to stay competitive in a fast-paced global market. The organization turned to Red Hat OpenShift to create a private cloud container environment. This has helped the Porsche Informatik’s developers to now take advantage of self-service capabilities, and teams across the organization can work together more effectively with a DevOps approach supporting continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows. As a result, this has helped Porsche Informatik to cut down development time from weeks to hours and created a solid foundation to stay ahead of competition.
“Our old approach involved several teams and lots of round of approvals, and we’d need sometimes as long as six weeks to develop an application. Today, with Red Hat OpenShift, we can have a prototype available within hours.” Simon Waldner System Engineer, Porsche Informatik
SPEEDING APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AS AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY SHIFTS TO DIGITAL
Porsche Informatik provides IT services to the Volkswagen Group. Millions of users at car dealerships, workshops, importers, logistics companies, and financial service providers depend on its systems. The organization provides and manages 160 solutions available in 30 countries.
To help shape the digital future of the automotive industry, Porsche Informatik has focused on becoming agile by design to rapidly create and deploy new, digital applications. This goal not only involves a cultural shift to more iterative, agile development but also the replacement of the organization’s legacy IT infrastructure and management solutions.
“Time to market is critical. In this industry, you’re either first to market, or the first loser. We want to migrate our legacy infrastructure to a platform that can help us build cloud-native applications quickly.” said Michael Hinterland, Team Lead, ICS Cloud & Automation and ICS System and Middleware, Porsche Informatik.
MIGRATING TO A CONTAINER-BASED, CLOUD-NATIVE PLATFORM WITH RED HAT OPENSHIFT
Porsche Informatik has migrated its application infrastructure to Red Hat OpenShift. The organization has used Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2015 and worked with data center provider and Red Hat partner eww ITandTEL in 2017 to establish a private cloud environment. “Our corporate ambition is to become a leader in modern software development and to achieve that goal with in-house talent,” said Hinterland. “Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for Linux container development, making Red Hat OpenShift the clear choice in container technology for us.” Based on the Kubernetes container orchestration standard, Red Hat OpenShift provides a stable container platform environment for end-user-facing applications, as well as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline support for development teams. Porsche Informatik has also adopted Red Hat Satellite, part of Red Hat Smart Management, to efficiently manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift infrastructure. With help from eww ITandTEL and a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), the organization migrated to Red Hat OpenShift running on-premise in its datacenter in just six weeks. The platform now hosts development processes across thousands of containers on 75 nodes, used regularly by more than 350 developers.
LEADING THE INDUSTRY IN NEXT-GENERATION SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Reducing development time from weeks to hours with a container-based, cloud-native development environment, Porsche Informatik has been able to establish self-service capabilities for its development teams. Developers can provision services and infrastructure independent of the organization’s infrastructure team. Additionally, administrators can more easily implement and enforce security and other policies across teams and clusters using Red Hat OpenShift’s unified management console. Red Hat Smart Management helps keep Porsche Informatik’s Red Hat infrastructure solutions up to date, protected from vulnerabilities, and in compliance with various standards.
As a result, applications and services can be built, tested, and launched to market 90% faster than before. The old approach involved several teams and lots of round of approvals, and we’d need sometimes as long as six weeks to deploy an application. Today, with Red Hat OpenShift, we can have a prototype available within hours,” said Waldner.
ESTABLISHED COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY WITH DEVOPS
Adopting a more agile, collaborative DevOps approach, supported by Red Hat OpenShift, has helped Porsche Informatik unite its IT teams. Now, developers, architects, infrastructure experts, and platform teams can work together more effectively to build and update innovative applications and services—in a way that removes repetitive, unnecessary work and takes advantage of their key strengths.
BUILT IN-HOUSE CONTAINER EXPERTISE WITH RED HAT GUIDANCE
One of Porsche Informatik’s key goals of being an early adopter of OpenShift was to become proficient with container technology ahead of the competition and become a leader in modern software development. To build its teams’ skills with OpenShift and Kubernetes, the organization continues to work closely with its Red Hat Technical Account Manager after initial deployment.
ACCELERATING GLOBAL AGILITY WITH PUBLIC CLOUD
After successfully adopting Red Hat OpenShift, Porsche Informatik is exploring how the latest version, Red Hat OpenShift 4, could provide new capabilities to continue its modern application development journey.
“Our sights are set on deploying Red Hat OpenShift on a public cloud sometime in the future, with core system access through defined, web-based APIs [application programming interfaces],” said Hinterland. “Our goal is to use RedHat OpenShift to provide our applications for internal and end users across 26 countries, from Chile to Malaysia.”
