How Porsche is Using Cloud Foundry to Develop Better Software

Key Takeaways

[Music] Payet Alex Williams the new staff welcome to the new stack makers of podcast where we talk about application development deployment and management and skill [Music] the Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization formed to sustain the development promotion and adoption of cloud foundry as the industry standard platform for cloud applications cloud foundry is an application platform that provides a choice of clouds developer frameworks and application services - makes it faster and easier to build tasks deploy and scale applications it's an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances learn more at cloud foundry or [Music] it's Alex Williams with a new stack and here today at the Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague and I am really excited for this interview I have joining me the taya Stubb IT project manager and prototype Arab Porsche Cayenne thank you for joining us and in thurston torque step product owner at Porsche that's like three starts thank you very much for joining us we were just talking about how the automobile really is a symbol of so much traditionally that we know about in terms of modern society but it's increasingly a symbol of our future Society too how do you see that at Porsche right so Porsche is currently in a transformation from being a sports car manufacturers into a mobility provider that means which is a very big difference right we want to provide mobility very exclusive and supportive mobility of course as we of course but it also means Porsche needs to change internally a lot and there's a lot of transformation that's why I call the transformation internally on going to make the switch from and sports car manufacturers to a mobility provider and mobility provider requires a completely different car a much more connected car equipped with a lot of connected car services than just riding and driving a 911 on the racetrack so it's a very very big change in transformation but it's still a car it's still a sports because some Porsches are beautiful so how do you retain that beauty in that connected experience as a mobility provider when you maybe just recognize that the new launch of the Thai car recently in the last few days as new electric car yes and even there of the extended our way of presenting mobility this second display for the second passenger ride so and feeling that this different service and application that's the change and the challenge we still have providing new features which are target oriented and fulfill the premium quality so the mobility company that Porsche is becoming requires a perspective about software that is new to almost anyone and especially has ramifications for people who drive the cars [Music] the experience of that automobile and that has to come through in the software development doesn't it absolutely you're absolutely true and so we have various kind of software which is created in that respect software that is running within a vehicle software that is supporting mobility solutions may be consumed by a mobile phone application and also just some back-end production supporting software so a lot of different kind of software which is to be developed but needs to be integrated and hopefully seamlessly integrated to provide this very round and sound mobility experience absolutely actually to drive that further we in the Fortran group created a separate brand the software organization as we found out that it is best not to develop software which runs in almost all vehicle and it gets slowly commodity right in its created during all the brands but rather put and centralized in one central software frame what we have now which is then providing their software solution to the brands like Porsche or Audi based communication given by that organization so from the car to the back end and to end with the IT paradigm in the middle website and based on top of that you can build the services differentiating the different brands and value nicely so so this requires a a different way of organizing product development and it has to be both from a perspective of the you know executive management into the product and then shifting the perspective to the developer how have tell me about when this when this started how do Porsche get started along this journey I mean them might be already long time ago individual smaller budgets who did that but recently we've been involved in a bigger work stream we call it a natural release trend with above 100 people building that software platform and within that you have the natural way of working with cross-functional teams including different partners and different brands all together building the new software in a natural manner using modern technologies with right and you were very right about support of the executive management this is very much needed because it won't change anything if the executive management won't back it up and so we have thing called italic portion which is this transformation transformation initiative which actually allows or forces or pushes us actually to transform our processes to really change us the actual processes we are the automotive development process is very strict and stringent right it's a few years process and you can say if I started now in five six years from now there will be a car out of it but in software development these cycles five six years they did this best work right so there is kind of what kind of software development processes like this development process need to be integrated at what stage in the hardware development process which is very interesting by because it's it there's not one proves but it's kind of iterating maybe it's just a comment on that make it simple one been example if you have sensors and actors and that's how they're fixed at some certain point of production so you can't change them but building you services on top of existing functionality combining that and making that productive that's the challenge we have nowadays because we talked about the hardware which is really the automobile hmm right and so tell me then about how you've had to organize yourselves you know I mean we see developer teams trans transformed a lot how are you know tell me about the teams that are working in the software development process like what is your role on the team who are some of your team members are they all developers are they designers right right so as Todd mentioned before it's a cross-functional team we were working in together in that project and this means so developers from vehicle software components as well as we representing more the cloud part of the software development part they were working together also with some some help from external partners even to make it very diverse set up to have a very diverse Arab of roles and and not just have just one single kind of developer role in there we believe having a diverse team really results directly on better outer total outcome better software quality better outcome of the product actually so we are in a mixed team so my personal role was more of broader typing into prototyping stuff trying out things boy kind of in the research phase and so I was working more on trying out new technology personally and I have to pleasure too in that project being the product owner and also continuing the journey Vista user stories and bringing the value to the customer and presenting that at every product increment presentation every three months to our management that's another way of being agile and making that visible so an awesome management that influences your next three months schedule and say I'm happy with the objectives you lined out or I'm not happy and you need to change so an even things changed along our journey so yeah I imagine they changed quite a bit what so tell me then you know talk to me about Cloud Foundry you know and you know we're talking about at scale development right how are you running cloud you know tell me about kind of the Cloud Foundry implementation that you're they've been developing how many people do you have working on these projects I mean you know are you running Cloud Foundry on top of kubernetes are you running it in other ways let me start and Matthias will join in again at some more I mean the good thing is we had possibly and we have two folks one group is as a big part in the back let's say and they are running a cloud foundry instance or even a farm for us there's lots of service in the marketplace which is this makes it easy for us to concentrate on delivering the business value so us from a project perspective we started with a small team in an incubator phase and then went on the more serious resolution and at the point of time we integrated the first communication part on this I think it makes me there are 20 people from on boards to off board including ourselves so the different partners so that worked out very well and they did not have any hassle providing infrastructure ramping up until a certain point when we then recognized we need some more flexibility right so we were asked wasn't mentioned using the Cloud Foundry installation provided by our folks but the colleagues who are doing the hosting and the management of the marketplace and we were using very much the services also within the marketplace provided data services and services and at some point in time especially when looking at the development of ink are software we came to the conclusion we also need to simulate and test all these different vehicles and at that point in time we found couponing is very available because we could in curse of the components put in a container spin it up and then interact with the components developed on Cloud Foundry to happen and to end test run or simulation run also a load test run in the end so for us Cloud Foundry was the base of the backend development but for the simulation and testing we used for example in our case these Koopa need is to simulate this is Carson so kubernetes kubernetes is still fairly new in Cloud Foundry is pretty well established for that push environment so tell me about you know an automobile is just is like there's really like the computer you know and the software needs to get updated and you need to be continuously developing the Soliman how do you organize yourself to continuously deliver sovereignty powers on the right so we have a thing called powerful life which means this is not just and this also changed right in the last few years so it's it's not if it's produced then it's out and we never see but now we have over-the-air updates we have continuous editing applications for infotainment and so on and so it's it really changed and the focus on one model which is now coming out like the tie can change into this life long relationship and updates and that means a lot of real structuring in the organization right and it's really a big change if you until a four year a few years ago you just have it produced and then it's basically out and just maintenance mode right but this is completely different now right it's not a maintenance mode it's rather still adding functionality and and pushing stammering it always goes to some kind of container which allow you to update software frequently so tell me then about your technology stack and you know for years you know for the you know for that for the platform right so we having called a coin the term automotive clout all right which is kind of an extended ilt platform and so we are using IOT technologies like we announced the partnership with Microsoft on that like the azure IOT component in between to just get the messaging up and running and use they are they are platform for the for the connectivity but on top of that we have added functionality to provide great developer experience and that is one thing I also because I use Cloud Foundry a lot in my past I wanted to bring over from the Cloud Foundry developer experience to developing future mobility services I wanted to bring over this kind of very easy and flexible develop development experience without the burden of a lot of operational hassle and and so we have used that as a platform for the communication but for the developers we've created as on top of it a set of api's or mechanisms or paradigms like for example we source based communication or message based communication on top of that to have a very easy and simplified experience for developing this future mobility service in the vehicle in the cloud and also in the combination imagine I mean that's what I would call the unified API experience from the top you'll also have here is that business value comes also from the time to market at the API and the vehicle is stable and the area in the back in the stable regardless of the communication platform I'm using because it might move even further 5g is coming up and other technologies might enable us to transport data even quicker than today so how should we organize ourselves to leverage the benefit rather than to be stuck in technology stacks so that's why we choosing this kind of architecture so one of the things that we find at least at the new stack is that you know we think we all understand that that software is critical to business in increasingly software is open source yeah how are you managed how are you approaching open source where would you consider yourselves on that trajectory we just we're about to release our open source survey results we do with the Linux Foundation and one of the findings we have is like how important it is for recruitment how important it is your culture yeah and but still companies are not releasing a lot of projects like okay they're still using existing open source I'm curious for you guys so let me take that one we have a very diverse set of developers in our team and some are contributing to to some open source projects interesting one thing comes to mind which is for some rocket chat we use for example rocket shed internally for providing support for the users of our Cloud Foundry installation what we have and we have a committee of colleague who pushes out some rocket chat fixes or proteins which we then can use internally but this is something which we can easily just push push upstream another thing is in the vehicle we of course also using Linux one more and there is currently like of more reluctance right to push things out of this kind of hardened Linux tab but we are trying to push back the findings what we have at least to the community but rather not not publish in and you destroy or something like that but rather putting it in its very more pieces the contributions or comments or findings back to the community so it's it's a very very broad range we are open source what we use we are also trying to contribute back and and give back what we also use from from the wealth of source technology available we also have specific open-source offices in the photo uncle especially which tries to foster that I but also clear out some legal hurdles because it's in that it's it's automotive industries about reducing risks and risks means a lot with legal wrists and and all these things and so trying to move that fascinating times and because I mean that continuous delivery requires that free flow software to make it very fluid doesn't it and then I guess I'm my last question is where do you go from here and you know what is what's on the horizon you know for you as a mobility company and with software at the development at the corner I think it continues to get more focused on the customer value so that we concentrating on providing these services for friend but with using the let's say the basement for general technologies like having a common platform the just do the transport is enough but I can then focus on my business value and my customer I think that's one thing which is definitely the focus from the branch opinion yeah so from the overall perspective we are in the midst of the transformation and we actually just started the actual transformation and it will take quite a few years until we really can say we have an agile company or we're delivering really a lot of the functionality in a natural way and so it's really internally very challenging and we are trying to to find the best best way and iterating over things and themes and structures and so on so this is very interesting our our North Tower or where we we see us in the future is absolutely to become a software enabled company on on portion level but also on the for to improve level and and that's also already started with this new software organization which is kind of a brand in our group now and and this is where we're actually it is having on queue to provide to use software which enables business cases if we see changing from car manufacturer to mobility provider a lot of new business models are like shared mobility and so on on the horizon and which is really things where we need to be flexible change faster fail faster but also learn fast and for that I think the cloud foundry platform for prototyping as well as for production use turned out for us to be very valuable in of speed and reliability and also the ecosystem of the marketplace I think that's also one goal is that the brand's share their assets and their services through some cloud loudly marketplace especially to bring it all all forward I could only underline that so from our smart mobility projects goals where our teams working already agile in the application for the mobile app let's say in things like platform and services where we currently bet in their cell to other business services yeah what connectivity features that they are in the car so brand recognition must be important in the in the external community to show your software friendly operation is it becoming a brand effort to like to actually kind of tell the story about Porsche and the Volkswagen Group as a place where developers have you know I mean there's definitely there were recently a lot of public announcements around that or a model of initiative we have together with Microsoft and that we are building off a lot of resources and these are software developers so I mean that's what you said at the beginning of the talk the the industry changed because the challenge is more to get connected more autonomous driving and all that stuff and that requires salt and every unit developers and again so we experience it live first with Cloud Foundry and Cuban artists in combination this journey it wouldn't happen otherwise and that quick or short period of time I would say well fascinating stuff thank you so much both three time you know really interested in following this and looking more underneath the hood so to speak right the software on you know these these cars and how it's being developed and built so I'm enjoy by mattias hub and Thurston Turks step thank you very much for your time thank you for having that to be here the Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization formed to sustain the development promotion and adoption of cloud foundry as the industry standard platform for cloud applications cloud foundry is an application platform it provides a choice of clouds developer frameworks and application services - makes it faster and easier to build tasks deploy and scale applications it's an open-source project and it's available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances there are more at Cloud Foundry or [Music] listen to more episodes of the new stack makers at the new stack dot io / podcasts please rate a review us on iTunes like us on YouTube and follow us on soundcloud thanks for listening and see you next time [Music]