Customer Stories / Energy - Power & Utilities
2020
The next generation OTA uses a serverless architecture from AWS to connect more than 10 million vehicles for the upcoming CASE era
“CASE” (Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared/Services, Electric) is the key word in the automotive industry, which is going trough a major change. One important element, “connected cars”, are becoming more popular. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hitachi, Ltd.’s Industry & Distribution Business Unit has built its OTA (Over the Air) service platform that wirelessly updates software in connected cars. With the aim of delivering a service that can handle connections from more than 10 million cars, the company has developed a prototype that adopts a serverless architecture. As the result of prototype, they can recognize that it not only can achieve around 50% of cost reduction compared to EC2 instance-based architecture, but it can also drastically reduce operational human workload.
Developed
a serverless application using Prototyping Program and AWS Chalice
Achieved
the target of 1,000 requests/second (rps) for the number of simultaneous accesses from connected cars
Estimated
50% reduction in infrastructure costs as compared to existing instance-based architecture
Enabled
engineers to focus on developing services by reducing their operational workload
Overview | Developing a wireless update system integral to the popularization of connected cars
Ever since Hitachi, Ltd. (“Hitachi”) was established in 1910, we have been putting efforts into solving challenges in our society with a corporate philosophy of “contributing to society through technology.” At Mobility and Manufacturing Systems Division of Industry & Distribution Business Unit, we are advancing the development of a platform that supports connected cars, which is an integration of IoT technology and automotive system technology. One of the core technologies in realizing this goal is the OTA that wirelessly updates software in cars.
Cars in recent years are making a transition from hardware controlled systems to software controlled systems, increasing the importance of ECU (Electronic Control Unit) software. Even though ECU software’s functionality and security have been continuously enhanced and updated, users (such as car owners) have to bring their cars to a dealership to keep it up to date.
With the OTA that can wirelessly deliver updated software, users can save the time and effort of bringing their cars in, and still maintain the latest and safest environment. “The ratio of connected cars will continue to grow. We expect that more than half of the cars on the market will be connected cars by 2025, and the market will be dominated by connected cars by 2035. As the autonomous driving technology progresses, ECU software’s complexity will also increase, and needs to be updated more frequently. For this reason, we decided to develop an OTA software update service in-house to remotely update and maintain software, then provide it to automotive manufacturers as SaaS,” said Mr. Hiroshi Saito, General Manager of Automotive System Dept.3, Mobility and Manufacturing Systems Division.
Opportunity | Deciding to migrate to serverless for cost improvement and added value
Since Hitachi wanted to use a cloud infrastructure with high scalability to develop the OTA service from the beginning, we adopted AWS for the PoC environment in 2016. Ms. Naomi Izumi, an engineer at Automotive System Dept.3, Mobility and Manufacturing Systems Division explained the reason for selecting AWS.
“Because of the possibility of the requirement to build systems on a regional basis for delivering our service to automotive manufacturers with global market reach, As a result of examining cloud providers based on this requirement, we found that AWS was most innovative on cost, scalability, and services. Also, we determined that it was certainly safe to entrust AWS for meeting our security requirement instead of us doing it on our own, since AWS is compliant to many of standards.”
The PoC infrastructure was built with Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB. Based on the PoC results, we started developing our service infrastructure in 2017. In 2018, we started providing our OTA service as a part of “Lumada”, Hitachi-branded digital innovation platform as its core IoT strategy.
The OTA service got off to a good start. However, in order to have more manufacturers use the service, we needed to make additional cost improvements and deliver more added value. For that purpose, Hitachi considered migrating to a serverless architecture. We again decided to adopt AWS based on the proven results so far.
“With our goal to have more than 10 million cars connected in the future, server cost and operational cost will be enormous if we have to scale our existing infrastructure. Also, connections from connected cars tend to increase during the morning rush hour, and decrease to almost zero during the late night hours, causing a major gap in the number of connections during the “on” hours and the “off” hours. In consideration of scalability and efficiency, we selected AWS’ serverless architecture,” said Mr. Saitoh.
We were able to achieve the adoption of serverless architecture for our OTA service, which will wirelessly update automotive software, and connect more than 10 million cars without increasing our cost. Despite it being our first serverless application development, with AWS’ support program, we were able to build the system in one month, that shortened the estimated development period.”
Mr. Hiroshi Saito
Hitachi, Ltd., Industry & Distribution Business Unit
Enterprise Solutions Division
Mobility and Manufacturing Systems Division
Automotive Systems Dept.3
General Manager
Solution | Solving the challenges to go serverless with Prototyping Program
The project to build the next generation OTA service infrastructure was started in April, 2019. First, we built a PoC environment to examine if the performance requirement could be achieved. Our PoC development team had a total of 7 members, who were in charge of infrastructure, application, design, etc. Since we had to quickly examine if we could actually build our service using a serverless architecture, we utilized AWS’ support program called Prototyping Program. The entire team and several AWS solutions architects worked for 4 days to design and develop a prototype. We used AWS Chalice, a dedicated framework for the serverless architecture, for the prototype, and finished building the environment in one month after starting.
Ms. Naomi said that “many AWS solutions architects joined our Prototyping Program and gave us suggestions from many different perspectives. They also provided us with a precise solution for client authentication, which was one of the challenges we listed when defining requirements.”
The next generation OTA service was built around serverless architecture, using products such as AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB. In addition to this, we have linked the authentication with X.509 certificate using AWS IoT and the security capabilities of Amazon API Gateway to meet our authentication requirement.
“During the verification immediately after the development, we had a few issues with AWS Lambda’s functionality, especially with increased latency. However, with the major update on AWS Lambda in December 2019, we were able to achieve our target of 1,000 requests/second (rps) without re-evaluating the architecture,” said Ms. Naomi.
For the server cost, we have obtained an estimated result indicating that it is possible to reduce the cost by around 50% as compared to our existing structure. We expect that our operational human workload will also be reduced since this eliminates the need for server management.
Outcome | Migrating other systems for connected cars to the serverless architecture
We are currently working on commercializing the serverless OTA service, based on the PoC result. At Automotive System Dept.3, Mobility and Manufacturing Systems Division in Enterprise Solutions Division of Industry & Distribution Business Unit, we have other connected car systems running in AWS’ instance-based environment in addition to this OTA service. Building on this experience, we are considering migrating our existing system infrastructure to serverless architecture to promote modernization.
“Connected car systems cover a broad range of areas including OTA, IoT, AI, and big data. In order to expand our business, we will actively adopt AWS’ serverless architecture to increase development productivity and reduce costs. We expect that AWS will continue to provide us with new features on a short cycle as well as based on users’ needs,” says Hiroshi.
About Hitachi
Hitachi, a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Japan, is a diversified enterprise that operates in eleven business segments including information and telecommunication systems. The company is using authorized AWS Training & Certification courses to develop its Solution Architects into AWS specialists. As a result of training its staff, Hitachi gains deeper knowledge of its cloud services customers and can now better support them with their cloud implementations.
AWS Services Used
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume.
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It's a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications.
AWS IoT
AWS offers Internet of Things (IoT) services and solutions to connect and manage billions of devices. Collect, store, and analyze IoT data for industrial, consumer, commercial, and automotive workloads.
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. The API serves as a "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, and functionality from back-end services.
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