ŠKODA AUTO, a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group (VWG), is a leading car manufacturer in the Czech Republic with several factories around the world. The company identified the need to shift its two on-premise solutions to the cloud for enhanced scalability and global availability, as part of its production digitalization initiative. To this end, ŠKODA AUTO partnered with Trask, an established cloud specialist, and leveraged the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).
One of the migrated systems is a unified platform for the visualization of production and logistics data, comprehensive interactive guidelines, and streaming multimedia content to various factory visualization devices. The system is mainly used for guiding the worker on the assembly line (visualization of production procedures and instructions). Additionally, the system provides data visualization of the status of the individual technologies entering the production process in the central control room or the workers’ offices. The second system is mainly used for displaying electronic versions of documentation including logs, and automating actions that replace the physical delivery of paper documentation. It also ensures process control through integrated automated control mechanisms. Both systems run 24/7 and are critical for production, so there is a strong emphasis on resilience and minimalization of RTO & RPO. Both solutions are considered VWG-wide products for visualization in manufacturing for the future. Related to this is the requirement that this solution must be deployable in a Digital Production Platform (DPP, tailored AWS accounts in VWG for production).
The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS’s experience migrating thousands of enterprises and SMD customers to the cloud and on an outcome-driven methodology:
- Rapid evaluation of current workload and infrastructure
- Estimation of cloud solution costs
- Company readiness for cloud migration
- Discovery of critical knowledge gaps
- Fast prototyping and evaluation of the target solution
- Security and compliance assessment
Trask solutions, as a certified AWS partner, conducted a comprehensive assessment of both existing on-premise solutions and identified the key components that needed to be migrated. The assessment included a thorough analysis of the applications’ architectures, dependencies, security requirements, performance metrics, and compliance regulations. The results of the assessment laid the foundation for devising an effective migration strategy. Based on the evaluation findings, Trask formulated a well-defined migration strategy tailored to meet ŠKODA AUTO's specific requirements.
- Re-architect approach: The focus was on rethinking the architecture and design of the application, taking advantage of cloud-native capabilities and services. The goal was to leverage cloud-specific features, such as scalability, elasticity, and resilience, to enhance the application’s performance and efficiency.
- Scalability and High Availability: Leveraging AWS’s elastic scalability and redundancy features, Trask designed a highly available architecture that could scale dynamically based on demand fluctuations, ensuring uninterrupted services.
