
Rivian Executes Vision of Agile Engineering on AWS
In 2020, Rivian found that its on-premises research and development information technology infrastructure could not keep up with its performance needs. Resource bottlenecks affected product lifecycle management, computer-aided design, and computer-aided engineering, so Rivian began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to architect an agile engineering environment.

People who were skeptical about high-performance computing in the cloud are more open minded after seeing our results on AWS.”
Madhavi Isanaka
Chief Information Officer, Rivian
Accelerating Innovation with Efficient Compute
“Our engineers expected the fix to take 6 months,” says Madhavi Isanaka, Rivian’s chief information officer. Instead, Rivian built a new compute cluster on AWS. “In 3 weeks, we had a working proof of concept on AWS,” says Isanaka. After that success, the company migrated its production environments. In the cloud, Rivian’s engineers can access and automate resources on demand.
Using the Breadth of AWS Services
AWS Select Consulting Partner X-ISS provides system and application technical support to Rivian’s computer-aided engineering team for Scale-Out Computing on AWS, which helps customers deploy and operate multiuser environments. “In early product development stages, we don’t have many physical vehicles, so we use AWS to bring the design space to life,” says Isanaka. Using Amazon FSx for Lustre, a fully managed storage service, Rivian can access shared storage quickly. And after consulting AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts, Rivian improved data availability using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which helps users maintain application availability.
On AWS, interaction with product lifecycle management has increased 66 percent. Rivian also improved failover using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—which makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Backup synchronization, which before took up to 1 day, now takes less than 1 hour. “As Rivian grows at a rapid pace, we need a highly scalable system,” says Surendra Balu, Rivian’s 3DExperience technical lead. “Changes that took 5 days now occur within minutes.” And using AWS CloudFormation, which enables users to speed up cloud provisioning, Rivian can deploy automatically through continuous integration / continuous delivery.
Optimizing for Efficiency and Innovation
About Rivian
Benefits of AWS
- Reduced need for physical prototypes
- Increased software speed by up to 66%
- Improved availability of compute resources
- Enabled collaboration through shared storage
AWS Services Used
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable storage for compute workloads. Many workloads such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video rendering, and financial simulations depend on compute instances accessing the same set of data through high-performance shared storage.
AWS Professional Services
The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts that can help you realize your desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud. We work together with your team and your chosen member of the AWS Partner Network (APN) to execute your enterprise cloud computing initiatives.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
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