Audi Business Innovation drives software development with Elasticsearch Service

This post is a recap of a community talk given at ElasticON 2020. Interested in seeing more talks like this? Check out the conference archive.

Today’s cars are computers on wheels, and they’re powered by software as much as they are by batteries or gasoline. When it comes to building software for Audi, Volskwagen, Porsche, Traton, and other brands, that’s a task assigned to Audi Business Innovation (ABI). 

“Developers need the right tools in their hands that are easy to use,” says Stefan Teubner, an ABI team leader and DevOps engineer. Elasticsearch Service is one of those tools that allows developers to “focus on developing software” instead of mundane infrastructure tasks.

At the architectural heart of ABI’s digital assembly line for the development of software is Elasticsearch Service. It helps the automaker remain a top competitor in autonomous driving, electric vehicles, and in-car digital experiences.

With this continued focus on streamlining their digital processes, ABI stays true to their motto, “We move people and shape the future.”

Making a sale from the car dashboard

Audi customers can purchase in-car digital experiences, such as voice recognition in certain vehicles, after they drive off the sales lot, explains Teubner. Customers can add these software experiences from their mobile phone, from an app in the car’s dashboard, or from the web. 

To keep this customer experience up and running, ABI relies on Elasticsearch Service as a central logging service to store log files so software issues can quickly be detected and fixed before the customer experience is impacted. 

“We wanted to provide a fast and easy-to-use service to store and analyze log files,” Teubner says. Kibana dashboards are great at searching and analyzing their 29 terabytes of log files and Elasticsearch Service comes with low operational costs as well as performs at a high level.

Elasticsearch Service, the reliable SaaS offering

Initially, ABI had a single Elasticsearch cluster running on premises. But that wasn’t good enough. They needed a solution with higher accessibility, scalability, reliability, flexibility and security. After surveying the market, ABI decided on Elasticsearch Service, a “reliable SaaS offering,” he says.

Now, every application gets its own Elasticsearch cluster with Kibana instances. Elasticsearch Service, available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, offers Rest APIs making it easy to spin up clusters and Kibana instances, and to configure those instances.

“We are just using it. We don’t need to take care of scaling. It’s all automated,” Teubner says. 

Watch the video to learn more about how Audi Business Innovation drives software development with Elasticsearch Service and helps them move people and shape the future.