Driving 63% Cost Savings and increasing availability for Volkswagen Group's Retail Portal with AWS
About the Customer
Volkswagen AG is a multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. It designs, manufactures, and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles and offers related services, including financing, leasing and fleet management.
Customer Challenge
Volkswagen runs a critical IT system called the Group Retail Portal (GRP) to handle authentication and master data management for business partners across its global dealer network.
The key challenges faced by Volkswagen included:
- Ensuring stable and secure operations for the business-critical system
- Improving performance and scalability to handle increasing user demand
- Optimizing running costs of the cloud infrastructure
- Implementing DevOps best practices for faster time-to-market
Addressing these challenges was crucial to mitigate potential risks and help Volkswagen maintain strong dealer relationships and support its long-term business objectives.
Partner Solution
Trask Solutions, an AWS Advanced Services Partner, was engaged to provide demand management support, program & project coordination, and technical consulting for the GRP system. The key activities encompassed several areas of focus.
A comprehensive AWS Well-Architected Review was conducted, analyzing the entire GRP ecosystem and providing recommendations for achieving operational excellence and ongoing improvements in cost and reliability.
The project involved optimizing the following AWS services: Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 and EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, AWS Config, AWS Systems Manager and Amazon SNS. Integration with on-premises systems like IBM ISAM and VMware was also addressed.
DevOps and automation efforts were a significant part of the project, with guidance provided on best practices and tools such as Terraform and AWS CDK. This included implementing infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, as well as switching to on-demand non-production environments to reduce costs. Performance and security were prioritized through supervision of load and performance testing, coordination of security testing and cloud security enhancements, and support for database migration from SQL to NoSQL.
Lastly, the project involved demand management and requirements engineering, which included defining requirements and solution designs, as well as tracking and coordinating work packages across teams.
Results and Benefits
- 63% savings in overall system costs through AWS optimizations and on-demand environments
- High availability solution achieving 99.999% SLA
- Improved performance and scalability utilizing AWS managed services
- Faster time-to-market through automation and DevOps best practices
- Enhanced security and reliability
About the Partner
Trask Solutions is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner providing cloud consulting services. With deep expertise across the AWS platform, Trask has a proven track record of delivering successful projects for global enterprises like Volkswagen Group.
