Executive Conversations: SEAT innovates on AWS

The automotive industry is going under a revolution. On top of the complexity of manufacturing cars and the thousands of systems required to do so, car manufacturers like SEAT,a Spanish automobile manufacturer owned by Volkswagen Group, needed to adapt to support new business opportunities brought by the electrification process, connected car and new types of micro-mobility.

To tackle these challenges, SEAT recognized that it needs to focus on innovation, increased development speed, and usage of new technologies. In 2019 SEAT IT created the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), a specialized team to promote and educate around the adoption of new cloud technologies at SEAT.

The CCoE’s goal is the definition and implementation of the most suitable solutions by bringing together the best of two worlds in a hybrid cloud setup with AWS. This dual use of infrastructure allows SEAT to scale seamlessly and leverage new technologies that help to solve current and future business challenges.

In the same year, SEAT founded SEAT:CODE, a fully owned subsidiary focused on creating new business models around the new mobility. Since its inception, SEAT:CODE has built data heavy, micro-service based solutions to tackle business challenges with Machine Learning and Big Data services. Among other projects, SEAT:CODE launched its “Giravolta” mobility platform in August 2020. Giravolta is a smart fleet management solution that is multi-brand, multi-vehicle, multi-modal and multi-user. This mobility platform is current used by multiple customers including the “SEAT Motosharing” service in Barcelona. SEAT:CODE also develops factory predictive maintenance use cases for industrial machinery that were first piloted in SEAT’s Martorell factory before being made available to the rest of the Volkswagen Group’s plants.

In this executive Q&A, AWS talks with SEAT IT COO, Iñigo Suárez and SEAT:CODE CEO & CTO, Carlos Buenosvinos to explore SEAT’s cloud journey on AWS.

Q: What is SEAT:CODE and what was the main idea behind creating a new software company?

Carlos: SEAT:CODE is SEAT’s “digital machine”, a software development center created to drive the company’s digital transformation.  With its digital native values and start-up like mindset, SEAT:CODE creates digital products and solutions for SEAT and CUPRA, and defines digital solutions for the Volkswagen Group. SEAT:CODE chases continuous disruption by doing things in a different way, not only by experimenting with new technologies, but also by employing new business methodologies and practices. Created in 2019, it has rapidly grown in projects, volume and employees. In 2021, it has more than 150 developers of 15 different nationalities. Furthermore, in a sector characterized by a considerable gender gap, 20% of its employees are women.

Q: How does SEAT as a company thinks about cloud transformation and what were some challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them?

Iñigo: SEAT is transforming its organization to make it more agile and transparent. This involves improving processes, technological solutions and speed in decision making. Cloud transformation is a key enabler for theses strategic goals, fostering innovation on SEAT IT. The first cloud project on AWS was developed in 2018 using new agile methods at SEAT. Integration of legacy technologies and traditional operations models with the speed of new agile methods and new technologies have been two challenges to address. Establishing a cloud center of excellence (CCoE) has helped enable transformation change management and training for IT teams to acquire new skills. This has been the key to successfully managing our cloud transformation.  AWS training and certification programs provide SEAT access to online and hands-on training and help us accelerate by training our software engineers in the latest technologies and best practices.

Q: How do you work with AWS and what role played AWS in your journey?

Iñigo: The AWS account team works hand to hand with us, and played a key role in our cloud adoption. AWS Solution Architects meet regularly with SEAT teams for architecture reviews, and support SEAT on Proof of Concepts and adoption of new technologies. The AWS team supporting SEAT is part of a dedicated team for Volkswagen Group, and help us share our experience with other brands. The AWS Technical Account Manager for the Volkswagen Group has helped us to ensure a smooth operation of production workloads on the AWS cloud.

Carlos: At SEAT:CODE, we run workloads on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on AWS Fargate as the default compute engine. When it comes to Data, depending on the use case, we use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) , Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR),  AWS Lambdas, or AWS Glue. We combined these tools with AWS Database Migration, AWS AppSync (GraphQL) and Amazon API Gateway. The best part is that the development teams work autonomously to create and operate their own infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions such as Amazon CDK and Terraform. In combination with our strong DevOps culture, we significantly reduce the time to market of our solutions.

Q: What were some key benefits for SEAT by building on AWS? 

Iñigo: The use of AWS has helped us to adopt new technologies for data management and machine learning much quicker, enabling us to increase our speed of innovation. Cloud enables SEAT IT to test, build and deploy new solutions with internal teams without the constraints and heavy efforts required when operating on legacy, on-premises infrastructure. By leveraging AWS based platforms, like the VW Digital Production Platform (DPP), we are able to share development artifacts, products, and skills with other brands.

Carlos: SEAT:CODE is also the responsible of the mobile apps and the websites of SEAT and CUPRA. Developing with AWS allows us to create scalable solutions, for example, when a new car model is announced or its pre-booking is available. In the space of logistics, SEAT:CODE is able to ingest large amount of data easily by implementing automatic scaling mechanisms based on number of deliveries, trucks, parts, routes, etc.

Q: How do you think about security in the cloud and are there some governance best practices? 

Iñigo: IT security is one of the pillars of a successful cloud adoption and has therefore been a top priority since the beginning of the adoption of AWS technologies. Usage of well architected frameworks, a mature governance of the AWS landing zones and security compliance controls, and monitoring are best practices implemented in every cloud project at SEAT. In 2020, SEAT IT Security Operation Center, which operates 24×7, has further reinforced its capabilities in Cloud security.

Q: How are SEAT IT and SEAT:CODE collaborating to create an impact for the company?

Iñigo: SEAT IT and SEAT:CODE work side by side to maximize the value delivered to the business in the fastest way possible while ensuring high quality of delivered products. We are able to do that by using agile methodologies and by boosting innovation. As an example, proof of concepts, MVPs, and low code technologies enable the company to run experiments to increase the business impact not only within SEAT, but in the whole automotive market.

Carlos: SEAT IT has long experience running reliable and resilient services for manufacturing and selling cars, while SEAT:CODE adds a new fresh flavor to chase new business opportunities. This combination is the key to create the “New Future Mobility” and turn our customers into fans.

Q: Thinking about the future of AWS and SEAT – What are you most excited about?

Iñigo: I am really excited to see how data analytics and machine learning will help to improve business and factory operations by correlating data of different business processes and systems. Cloud adoption allows us to integrate different systems with a flexibility we did not have before. This flexibility surfaces new opportunities to improve operations and develop new business models for SEAT.

Iñigo Suárez, IT COO, SEAT

Íñigo Suárez studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Navarra, a training that he furthered at the University of Alcalá with a Master’s degree in Management Development. In the field of work, it was in the company Siemens where he started working and began to specialize in the IT (Information Technology) department. Currently, after more than 10 years in different positions in SEAT IT, he currently holds the position of IT COO, IT Operations Manager.

Carlos Buenosvinos CEO & CTO, SEAT:CODE

Carlos is a passionate Tech Leader. He is an enthusiast of Lean, Extreme Programming, Domain-Driven Design, and DevOps mindsets with more than 20 years of experience in developing and more than 15 years of experiencing leading tech teams. He has played various leading roles, such as Tech Lead, VP of Engineering, CTO, and CEO. He has mentored engineering and product teams of up to 150 members in different markets (E-commerce, E-Learning, Payment Processing, Classifieds, Recruiting Market, Supply Chain, and Shared Mobility), in various distributed locations, and multiple company sizes (Start-ups, Established Companies, and Multinational Companies).