Azure Kubernetes Service.
What is Azure Kubernetes service?
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications with confidence.
BOSCH CASE STUDY.
Bosch increases vehicle safety using map-matching algorithms and Azure Kubernetes Service
Bosch has partnered closely with the world’s automakers for decades. The company continues to develop networked safety and assistance systems that support drivers today and pave the way for fully automated driving.
The Challenge.
When the product team brainstormed the idea to solve the problem of wrong-way driving, they did not know whether it was technically possible. For such a service to work commercially, it had to locate vehicles in real time with pinpoint precision.
Smartphones or an onboard connectivity unit can anonymously record GPS coordinates and can send that location data to the cloud if the device is in a hotspot area, but GPS satellites broadcast their signals in space with only limited accuracy. What is received depends on many factors, including satellite geometry, signal blockage, atmospheric conditions, and the design and quality of the receiver. For example, GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate within a 4.9-meter (16-foot) radius under open sky.
The Bosch team had to solve two major issues: first, to get the last piece of information out of the noisy sensor data; and second, to develop a highly scalable and ultra-flexible service to process the data in near real time. The question was how to build a real-time data ingestion and processing pipeline capable of returning notifications to drivers within seconds.
The problem was speed. The team assumed that devices emitting location information, such as smartphone apps and automotive head units, could eventually send thousands of data points to the solution per second, from all over Europe and eventually other countries. Bosch needed lightning fast compute capable of filtering events and pushing a notification back to an end device within 10 seconds — the time estimated to make the solution viable.
The Benefits.
The team decided to offload the work of scaling and cluster maintenance to a managed service in a public cloud with a global reach. Thanks to the trusted partnership Bosch had with Microsoft, Azure Kubernetes Service was the obvious choice. A team of Microsoft cloud solution architects worked closely with Bosch engineers, who provided valuable feedback to Azure product teams. Microsoft continues to work with Bosch teams around the world. Working together, they devised a solution that produced the speed Bosch needed.
The key was orchestration. By orchestrating the deployment of containers using AKS, Bosch would get repeatable, manageable clusters of containers. Bosch already had a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) process to use in producing the container images and orchestration. The result: increased speed and reliability of deployments.
AKS also offered the simplicity of a managed Kubernetes service in the cloud. It provided the elastic provisioning that Bosch wanted, without the need to manage its own infrastructure. In addition, the developers did not have to rethink all their design decisions. Instead, they could take the core business logic developed on-premises using the open-source tools they knew and run the solution virtually as is, within a faster infrastructure with a worldwide reach. The developers can deploy self-managed AKS clusters as needed, and they get the benefit of running their services within a secured network environment.
In addition, by running their solution on Azure and AKS, the average time to calculate whether a driver is going the wrong way could be improved to approximately 60 milliseconds.
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