Driving excellence: Toyota boosts efficiency using AWS Unified Operations

As one of the most recognizable automotive brands and the world’s largest auto manufacturer by volume for 6 years in a row, Toyota requires always-on, resilient cloud infrastructure to support connected vehicles, dealer operations, supply chain, and customer engagement at scale.

As these workloads grew in scale and complexity, Toyota wanted proactive application-specific expertise, always-on incident response, and continuous operational guidance. A team that already understood Toyota’s configurations, priorities, and business objectives could respond faster to critical incidents while supporting more forward-looking planning.

“We wanted a support team that would intimately know our AWS environment,” says Mitch Aubin, manager of brand engagement technologies at Toyota. “They would be familiar with how we operate and our business objectives, then be there along the way to proactively guide and respond to us.”

Toyota works alongside an AWS Unified Operations Team, which provides continuous guidance on resilience, observability, AI Operations, and cost optimization. These experts assist with proactive operations, such as reviewing and refining Toyota’s workload runbooks, as well as with strategic guidance, such as quarterly business reviews, weekly cadence checks, and technical workshops.

The engagement spans five distinct, critical Toyota workstreams: the Brand Engagement Center, which assists customers with warranty claims, vehicle service, and other issues live through phone support; Toyota’s Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which delivers secure, high-performance cloud desktops and applications for Toyota’s global knowledge workers and development teams; Connected Technology, which helps link vehicles with mobile devices; Supply Chain, which houses identification numbers for vehicles and parts distributed globally; and Dealer Services, which manages dealer functions across 1,800 Toyota and Lexus dealers in North America.

Using AWS Unified Operations support, Toyota has optimized its use of AWS products and services. The Brand Engagement Center powers hundreds of agents and millions of minutes per month using Amazon Connect Customer—an agentic AI solution that helps enterprises drive every interaction to resolution—which interfaces directly with Toyota customers. For Amazon WorkSpaces VDI, Amazon WorkSpaces applications offers a fully managed solution to deliver software-as-a-service and web-based applications. This includes providing an AWS end-user computing service optimized for software-as-a-service application streaming. Amazon WorkSpaces applications also provides secure access to critical applications, including Toyota’s ERP and CRM systems.

VehicleHub Supply Chain operates on a PostgreSQL database using Amazon Aurora, a serverless, relational database service that requires zero infrastructure management. Meanwhile, Amazon Route 53—a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications—facilitates multi-region failover for VehicleHub Supply Chain and Connected Technology workloads. Across workstreams, AWS Incident Detection and Response offers proactive management for critical workloads—including notifications when alarms increase within a certain region or the overall cloud environment—helping Toyota reduce the potential for failure and accelerate recovery of critical workloads. The company also implemented Amazon Application Recovery Controller to simplify and automate recovery and AWS DevOps Agent, a frontier agent for release management and production operations.

Working alongside AWS Unified Operations, Toyota has built twelve critical workload runbooks spanning 24 AWS services, delivered over 50 proactive operations reviews, and deployed AWS DevOps agent across 10 production workloads. AWS DevOps Agent validates and accelerates the deployment of code changes, then keeps applications running optimally across AWS, multicloud, and on-premises environments. During this time, Toyota has also completed 3 disaster recovery exercises. Additionally, through AWS Unified Operations support, Toyota identified a 10-times return on investment and has, in some areas, reduced AWS usage by 29.7 percent.

Toyota has strengthened its cloud resilience posture across multiple dimensions. AWS supported the design and validation of multi-Region architectures for critical workloads so that production traffic can shift seamlessly between regions during planned or unplanned events. Using services such as Amazon Application Recovery Controller, Toyota has moved from manual failover procedures to repeatable, automated resilience workflows, defining 44 proactive observability alarms. Regular disaster recovery AWS GameDay events, conducted jointly by AWS domain specialists and Toyota engineering teams, provide ongoing evidence that recovery-time and recovery-point objectives are achievable at production scale.

“AWS Unified Operations has fundamentally changed how we operate in the cloud,” says Jason Ballard, vice president of digital innovations at Toyota. “Our engineers are moving faster, deploying with greater precision, and operating with a high degree of confidence. The combination of proactive monitoring, automated resilience workflows, and context-aware expertise from AWS specialists means we can focus on delivering innovation for our customers rather than managing operational complexity. We’ve shifted from a reactive posture to one where we’re anticipating and preventing issues before they ever impact production, and that gives us the confidence to accelerate our digital transformation at scale.”