Ericsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

Case StudyConnected Vehicle
Cloud - the OEMchoice to innovate

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Ericsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

How a major automotive OEM used Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloudto support their software development and digital transformation

After successfully running their telematics program with supporting connected car application
for more than 10 years, the OEM wanted to take the next step with their connected vehicle
program. The OEM had the aim to differentiate their brand, and be seen as the leader in digitaland connected services. To achieve such a target required not only a major change in culture
but also ways of working, tools to support the transformation and a connected vehicle solution that allowed the OEM to work according to the agile principles.

Succeeding with digital transformationnecessitated the acquisition of additional
competence beyond the traditional OEM
base, to include software and service
delivery.
To make this shift possible the OEM had a long list of requirements
to be met, and a few of the major ones are described below.
• To be able to continually update and enhance existing services
and add new services during the vehicle life cycle: In the newworld of the software defined vehicle, car drivers have increased
expectations; they expect the same experience to that of using
their smart phone regardless of the application area – in-vehicle
entertainment, navigation or remote vehicle control.
• Secure that the money invested in service development maximize
the perceived value by the customers and internal users. Avoid
spending much of the development effort on develop andmaintain the generic solution functionalities but rather focus on
the innovative new services that will make the brand stand out
amongst competition.
• To easily accommodate 3rd party service providers in addition toin-house software development and make them part of the service
experience for the end user: How do they pick a solution that isflexible and futureproof? The OEM acknowledged that what
constitutes “state of the art” now has a limited shelf life and there
must be openness, flexibility and the fundamental basis within
the connected vehicle solution to embrace hitherto unthoughtof services. This would ensure they remain true to their brandambition of digital leadership.
• To have a global operations back-up to ensure high-quality
delivery of services in all markets: Regardless of how innovative
the services are, if availability and quality didn’t meet end-user
expectations, then there would be an adverse impact on brandimage.

To succeed the OEM knew that they neededa new development strategy and the rightglobal partner to support them on theirjourney.
To enable service development and reduce the complexity of connecting with the vehicle: The OEM wanted a partner that could provide acomprehensive automotive-specific API abstraction of the vehicle.

To pre-launch and test services in a flexible
manner was a pre-requisite to improve theoverall success of the connected services
program.
By allowing new services to be introduced to a selection of users, forinstance; drivers of a certain make and model of vehicle, in a particular region or of a certain demographic, the OEM could refine and perfect services based on the collected data prior to mass rollout. By testing services to limited user-base, they could streamline research anddevelopment efforts and increase the success of the eventual launch.
Application developers should be able to use the same deployment
and DevOps processes independent of region and cloud provider.

At the start of the journey, the OEM
knew they needed a solution designedfor change - with a car having a lifetimeof 15-20 years, it was a given that there
would be significant changes in services
and their delivery over time.

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Ericsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloud was selected to reduce thecomplexity for the OEM and allowed them to focus on what mattered
most: The ability to innovate. To able to do that, the OEM decided tohave a partner take responsibility for the technical and operationalfoundation required to rapidly develop, launch, and operate newconnected vehicle services
Developing services to meet the demands of today’s consumers requires developing, launching,evaluating, and improving services using continuous feedback loops. This process is typicallydescribed using the DevOps cycle.

Onboard
Application

AdjustApplication

Promote toProduction

selecting technology partners for their connected vehicle program.
Because of this, the use of standardized technologies and open APIs
as a foundation for all services in CVC is a highly valued facet. The useof leading open source technology ecosystems, such as Kubernetes,Docker Containers, and Git allows the teams to share development
environments with other projects, and facilitates re-use of technology
and competences within the IT or R&D organization. This also makes it
easier to change or switch out parts of the solution as requirements
and technologies evolve over time.

Logs andMetrics

Continuous
Integration

Dev

Verify Applicationin Integration Environment

Ops

Evaluate Business,
Vehicle and User impact| 2020-02-12 | Ericsson Internal | Page 1

DevOps Practices Enabled by Service Innovation Value Package

The OEM realized that implementing a new strategy for connected
services without changing, both, the existing organization and processes could lead to slower development and/or failure to competewith competitors and meet the perceived needs of their customers.

Resources and services are managed using APIs in Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloud. Those APIs can be accessed using the CV Portal,
REST APIs or by declarative APIs supporting a GitOps way of working.
This allows developers to use their existing development environments and enables different continuous integration pipelines to be
directly integrated with CVC in order to create a distributed continuous
deployment flow.
Operators

The need for change triggered the OEM to organize themselves
around services and implement the DevOps process. Teams weretasked to continuously develop, operate, and improve services end-toend. An architecture that supported this transformation throughout
the entire DevOps cycle was required.

Each development cycle starts with planningand action of the next service release, basedon feedback from production systems andwanted features from product management

Manifest
Developer

Example of an exposed API using Kubernetes operators to manage realm
and users in CVC Identity Access Management service| 2020-02-12 | Ericsson Internal | Page 2

The connected vehicle program of the OEM has, over the years,
grown to include more than 100 different services or services components. These services are developed by many different development
teams, in different organizations, which need to be able to work independently.
Each team controls the planning and design of their services, together
with the product management, and has direct access to request theresources and services they need from Ericsson Connected Vehicle
Cloud. An access policy control engine limits who can change whatand get access to which resources. The access policies also limit different applications from interfering with each other, this is critical in orderto enable the development organization to grow and work in an agile
manner.
The ability to design for change and avoid lock-in to proprietary
solutions was always been one of the main concerns of the OEM inEricsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

Screenshot of the Connected Vehicle Portal Application management

A highly automated verification, deployment, and promotion flow is the key toquickly and frequently launch new services, while meeting high stability andavailability demands of the automotive industry
Connected services are following the micro service principles and are tested, deployed and promoted independently from other services. That
implies that each service has its own Continuous
Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
pipeline.
The CI/CD pipeline is integrated into the Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloud, creating a distributed CI/CD pipeline where integration and verification of the service are done in the CVC integration and staging environment. This process
is in most cases automated; exceptions occurs
when the teams have a need for manual tests.
For example, verify a service with real vehicles inthe staging environment.
Large organizations with decoupled development using DevOps flows means that deployment and promotion approvals are delegatedto each team. Each team is self-organized andhave the mandate to define their own approvaland CI/CD flows.
Deployment and promotion flows for services
use GitOps based DevOps flows, where thewanted state of a service is declared in Git by theteam and then CVC make sure that the declaredstate is deployed as declared. This gives thedevelopment teams a single source of truth ofhow and where their service is deployed.

An example merge request CI pipeline for the OEM4

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Ericsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

Delivery of highly available and frequently changing global connectedvehicle services requires the ability to decouple the operations of theinfrastructure to reduce complexity and enable DevOps teams tomonitor their own services

DevOps teams continuously monitor their service with the tools of theirchoice, integrated with CVC to receive service specific metrics and logs.
Metrics related to service executions from CVC services are also available, enabling the development team to have a system view of theirservice.

to always be available to act on changes in traffic volumes, horizontal (up and down) auto scaling is configured for each service using
threshold value set by the team. The service must be built to support
auto scaling, and if that is not the case auto scaling is disabled and it isthen up to the team to manual scale the service.

Each developed service is different, some will handle a small amountof traffic, some will handle peak traffic during a couple of hours eachday. Predicting the traffic at each given time takes time to learn,always with a huge uncertainty. To minimize the need of the team

In addition, Ericsson CVC operation teams monitors all CV services
and infrastructure 24/7 using CVC built in logging and metrics tools.
Ericsson CVC operation team make sure that the infrastructure alwayshas the capacity required by the OEM traffic and services.

Example metric dashboard of a connected vehicle service

6Ericsson | Case Study – Connected Vehicle Cloud - the OEM choice to innovate

New types of connected services require new features in Connected
Vehicle Cloud. Ericsson is seen as a partner by the OEM with a tightcollaboration to continuously evolve the platform to support theOEM’s connected service needs

The CVC product roadmap is influenced by the OEM. 5 times a year, the appropriate OEMteams (including development) are invited to a roadmap and demonstration session. Ericsson
presents the latest features in CVC, both those related to services used by the OEM and otherareas of potential interest to the OEM. Certain features may be used to promote technology
and thought leadership at industry events.

The Service Innovation Value Package in Ericsson
Connected Vehicle Cloud is readily available to help
any OEM launch a new connected vehicle program or
accelerate development of an existing solution
Ericsson’s Service Innovation capability allows OEMs to connect vehicles
in a secure and scalable way, and todevelop and operate applications thatprovide backend services for vehicles
and users. It is built with the needs ofthe development and operations teams
in focus. It provides a set of services,that can be freely selected based on
the different and evolving needs of theOEM. All services are built to interwork
with other services developed by theOEM, delivered by public cloud or otherservice providers.
The services that can be selected from
Service Innovation include:

New Services in CVC demonstrated for the OEM• Application Execution Environment– A Kubernetes based container
orchestration platform with security
policies, continuous deployment,
and monitoring services to support
a distributed GitOps based DevOps
flow. Includes a self-service portal
for creating, configuring, andmanaging all applications deployedon the platform.
• Vehicle Communication Services – A
highly scalable vehicle connection
endpoint and message broker thatconnects vehicles securely andscales globally. Including ready to

use APIs to provision vehicles andcommunicate with vehicles.
• Application Support Services– Services available for hosted
applications to utilize and allow
developers and operations teams tofocus on the differentiating services.
Includes fully hosted, managed, andhardened databases (SQL/NoSQL),
in-memory data storage, message
brokers, metrics tools, and logging
tools.
• API Management Tools – An easy
to use self-service portal which
the OEM development managers
can use to manage which services
should be available for different
development teams and partners
organizations to use for theirdevelopment.
All services are provided globally witha 24/7 operations and support team,with guaranteed availability in accordance with the Service Level Agreement.
The Service Innovation services can beused together with other services in theConnected Vehicle Cloud i.e. Telematics
and Fleet Management and with theOEM’s own developed services createdusing Service Innovation.

For more information about Ericsson Connected Vehicle Cloud, visit:https://www.ericsson.com/en/internet-of-things/automotive/connected-vehicle-cloudEricsson enables communications service providers
to capture the full value of connectivity. The
company’s portfolio spans Networks, Digital Services,Managed Services, and Emerging Business and isdesigned to help our customers go digital, increase
efficiency and find new revenue streams. Ericsson’s
investments in innovation have delivered the benefitsof telephony and mobile broadband to billions ofpeople around the world. The Ericsson stock is listedon Nasdaq Stockholm and on Nasdaq New York.

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