How Porsche Informatik’s Cloud Migration Hinged on AI-Powered Observability
Dynatrace sponsored this post.
Porsche, Volkswagen, Audi, Lamborghini and Skoda are among the most well-known automotive brands in the world. However, what might be less known is how these brands derive many of their digital capabilities and solutions for providing automotive user experiences from Porsche Informatik.
Servicing millions of users across 29 countries and operating 160 different solutions and applications that form the backbone of those user experiences, Porsche Informatik is uniquely aware of the megatrends and industry pressures squeezing the automotive sector today. Between the rise of connected cars, autonomous driving, electric vehicles and an entire economy built on ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, the automotive user experience — and what consumers expect out of their cars — is changing at a rapid pace. Wider trends, such as digitalization and rising expectations of what an automotive user experience should be, are compounding these changes, as drivers and passengers increasingly expect a more connected, personalized experience from their vehicles.
Porsche Informatik knew it needed to be able to react quickly to these trends and provide the tools and applications for delivering a modern digital automotive experience. It also knew that doing this would require overhauling their IT environment into a more dynamic and agile one. This shift to becoming more agile by design would empower the solutions provider to:
- Accelerate innovation with their world-leading automotive software.
- Cut down on its time-to-market timetables.
- Find new ways to develop and support a robust suite of digital business capabilities.
- Create a more competitive advantage for itself by delivering faster software innovation and improved customer experiences.
A Dynamic Cloud Migration
In order to achieve these digital transformation goals, Porsche Informatik migrated from its monolithic IT environment to a more dynamic, hybrid-cloud infrastructure, built around Red Hat’s OpenShift container-as-a-service platform. But while this shift to the cloud provided the agility and scalability needed for innovating faster and reducing the time to market for its software delivery pipeline, it carried the same caveats of all cloud migrations: a highly dynamic and containerized technology stack also means greater difficulties in being able to manage, monitor and understand that technology stack.
Real agility requires more than just a hybrid-cloud infrastructure or Kubernetes orchestration; it also requires a break from past approaches to IT performance monitoring management. For Porsche Informatik and many other enterprises in its shoes, this rethink about monitoring and management meant ditching the old model of piecemeal implementation and integration of many different monitoring tools. Instead, these would need to be replaced with a more comprehensive, unified view of the environment’s infrastructure and applications — and the full impact of those components on the user experience. That’s where Dynatrace entered the picture.
Complex Environments Require Comprehensive Visibility
Porsche Informatik needed a new approach that demonstrated complete visibility into every layer of its IT environment, along with real-time observability into user sessions, precise answers (and quick remediation) for system anomalies and service degradations and native support for all major clouds and microservices. All of this also needed to be done within a single platform. Dynatrace ticked off all these boxes, providing an all-in-one, AI-fueled approach to observability that empowered the enterprise with a new confidence for accelerating the pace of its automotive software innovation.
This AI-powered method went beyond manual approaches to data analysis and the old ways of running through countless dashboards and logs. With an AI-backed platform, Porsche Informatik could unearth full end-to-end visibility across its OpenShift environment and achieve a precise account of, and instant answers for, its user sessions as they were happening.
Further, by developing new applications and services within OpenShift, the company can draw on these AI-based insights to optimize its code in real-time in response to user experiences, push innovations into its continuous delivery pipeline faster and resolve UX problems with an 80% faster mean time to repair than its previous approach allowed.
Unified Observability Drives Digital Transformation and User Experiences
At the end of the day, Porsche Informatik was able to optimize management of its IT environment, improve application performance and deliver exceptional user experiences for the online platforms that its car dealers and importers use, all thanks to a combination of AI-derived real-time insights and user-session analysis. That level of visibility gives its DevOps team instant feedback, which in turn informs and expedites the pace of software innovation delivery (reducing time to market by 90%) and, consequently, creates more robust digital experiences.
Porsche Informatik’s story is a reminder that for all the hype surrounding the cloud and the benefits that a multi- or hybrid-cloud architecture can provide over yesterday’s monolithic environments, migrating to the cloud cannot be done in a vacuum. To take full advantage of a dynamic and containerized cloud environment like OpenShift, enterprises need to adopt a more holistic and consolidated approach to managing and monitoring their technology stacks. This means ensuring they have unified observability across every component of their environment — applications, microservices, code and the interdependencies between them.
Anything less than full end-to-end visibility means you’re not getting the full story. And without that, you have no real way of knowing how your end users are being served, why service degradations may occur, how to resolve them and prevent them from occurring again, or how to leverage the cloud to its full potential in creating and delivering innovative software and user experiences faster than ever.
OpenShift is a sponsor of The New Stack.