MAN Truck Configurator: Journey to the AWS cloud

Modern trucks come with a variety of equipment for the buyer to choose from. The truck configurator helps the seller to configure the truck with the right capabilities according to the customer’s needs. The configuration is a critical part of the sales process.

In this blog, we explain how MAN Truck & Bus SE (MAN) migrated its truck configurator to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to help ensure availability, efficiency, and scalability.

MAN is one of the commercial vehicles brands of the Volkswagen Group producing trucks, heavy-goods vehicles, vans, bus chassis, coaches, interurban coaches, and city buses.

MAN employees worldwide use the Configuration4Sales (C4S) system to configure trucks according to their customers’ requirements. About 2,500 users in over 60 countries use C4S.

Running C4S on premises: Pain points

MAN and AWS Professional Services—a global team of AWS experts that help customers realize their desired business outcomes—created a project team to work on the migration. Before starting the migration, the team needed to learn why the migration was necessary—in other words, what pain points MAN was looking to remove. Here’s what they learned about MAN’s challenges when C4S was running on premises:

• Lengthy deployment cycle: Each application deployment required significant effort, extended downtime, and substantial work during nonbusiness hours, including nights and weekends. Deployments involved a comprehensive assessment of server versions on 143 servers, verifying proper initialization, and a time-intensive warm-up process that included extensive preparation and script launching.
• Limited feature releases: The lengthy development cycle impacted the frequency of feature releases. Infrequent feature releases have impeded innovation and slowed down the pace of continual improvement. With extended deployment cycles, development teams were accumulating a backlog of features, fixes, and improvements, resulting in larger, more complex releases. These larger releases often carried a higher risk of introducing issues and bugs because it was more challenging to thoroughly test and validate such substantial sets of changes.
• Operating system security patching challenges: Development teams scheduled bimonthly operating system security patches to address potential issues. Occasional permission discrepancies could arise after patching the production environment, so the process of preparation, warm-up, and results verification was time-consuming, requiring additional night shift hours.
• Increased operational cost: The servers always ran at full capacity, even during hours of low customer demand, resulting in unnecessary resource consumption and increased operational expenses. The financial burden from managing Oracle licenses and server operations was a constant challenge.

Once the team understood the pain points of using on-premises architecture, they could choose the right migration strategy.

Choosing the application migration strategy

The MAN and AWS project team chose different migration strategies depending on the subcomponents of the system. More specifically, they used the prioritization and migration strategy to help define the preferred approach. The team decided to re-platform the C4S application set that was running on Oracle and to re-architect and refactor for scalability and easier maintenance.

Re-platforming from Oracle to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

C4S initially ran on an Oracle database that included licensing costs and the ongoing management of database servers running 24/7 within the third-party data center. MAN migrated its database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, which is a database service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments on the cloud. The database runs on AWS Graviton processors, which is a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads. This migration removed the licensing costs, administrative burden, and complexity of MAN managing the C4S solution. Additionally, moving to AWS facilitated the use of cloud-based capabilities within Amazon RDS, such as the ability to schedule database suspension during the weekend, resulting in a significant reduction of costs and carbon footprint.

Re-architecting and refactoring: Going serverless

The project team decided to restructure the C4S monolithic Java-based web application, which was originally spread across 143 servers in a third-party data center. The transformation required a thorough shift towards a serverless architecture, removing the necessity to manage servers. This architectural refactoring and re-architecting separated the application into distinct functional components.

During the first phase, C4S was hosted on AWS Fargate—a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine—with time-scheduled scaling and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is an object storage built to retrieve any virtually amount of data from anywhere.

A portion of the backend was re-architected using three serverless AWS services. The project team used Amazon API Gateway—a to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs. It was backed with AWS Lambda, which is a serverless, event-driven compute service, and Amazon DynamoDB, which is a serverless, NoSQL database service.

For authentication and authorization, the team chose Azure AD and Amazon Cognito, which helps to implement secure, frictionless customer identity and access management that scales.

In the next phase, the application was further optimized and modernized by separating the frontend logic from the business logic. In this transition, the server-side framework was replaced with an Angular client-side application and server-side APIs. The frontend single-page application (SPA) was hosted on Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront, which is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. The rest of the application remained the same.

Image: Serverless architecture for MAN Truck Configurator

During the final phase of the program, the team migrated the customer-facing truck configurator website to AWS with its frontend hosted on Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 and its backend hosted on AWS Fargate.

The outcome was a serverless architecture, which not only removed the necessity for maintaining 143 servers, but also led to more dynamic and scalable infrastructure. This re-architecting and refactoring of C4S yielded a 30 percent reduction of total cost of ownership, concurrently eliminating the administrative overhead associated with server management. Following the migration, the required computing resources decreased by 35 percent. Furthermore, the carbon footprint of the workload was reduced, aligning with MAN’s vision on sustainability.

“With the cloud migration, we initially focused on costs savings, but we were positively surprised with the sustainability benefits,” says Stefan Lobenhofer, the application owner of C4S at MAN. “We compared the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of the previous data center and the share of renewable energy to AWS, and we had a clear advantage with migrating to the cloud. Then, with the refactoring, we reduced the required compute resources. By making it more energy efficient, we achieved a further improvement on our carbon footprint for this application.”

“We took a pragmatic approach when defining the migration strategy,” says Michael Aichner, the migration product owner at MAN. “We improved some areas, but not all of them, as we needed to finish the migration within the time and budget. Now that we are running in the cloud, we are further optimizing the system. Our next task is switching from scheduled scaling to auto scaling based on CPU usage.”

Conclusion

MAN chose to migrate its truck configurator solution to AWS to help reduce cost and operational efforts while improving performance and availability. The C4S application is now supported by a serverless architecture, and the solution is modernized to help facilitate scaling and easier maintenance. With the migration to AWS and modernization of the solution, MAN reached a compute resource reduction of 35 percent and a reduction in their IT carbon footprint.

You can migrate nearly any workload—applications, websites, databases, storage, and physical or virtual servers—and even entire data centers from an on-premises environment, hosting facility, or other public cloud to AWS. You can use AWS cloud migration resources and the company’s years of experience to build your organizational, operational, and technical capabilities to achieve business benefits faster.