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Reference: Success Story BMW Group - Remote Software Upgrade
ConSol for the BMW Group - Remote Software Upgrade
Digital solutions and services have become essential in vehicles, and special features often influence the purchasing decision. The corresponding software needs to be regularly updated in each vehicle for safety reasons and to comply with legal requirements, such as the UN regulation UNECE R 156. Since 2022, ConSol has been operating and further developing the Remote Software Upgrade product for the BMW Group's 'Connected Drive' division.
In this project, we were able to demonstrate impressively how significant results can be achieved with very manageable effort – provided one identifies the bottlenecks and has the best possible alternatives ready for implementation.
Simon Fleischer
Team Leader Software Engineering at ConSol
When ConSol took over the project, most system components had already been migrated to the AWS cloud using a Lift & Shift approach, with around 30 services in place. EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) was used to orchestrate instances of the implemented services. The PostgreSQL database was managed using the Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon MQ (ActiveMQ) was used as the message broker. However, the rapidly increasing number of vehicles requiring updates led to limitations due to ActiveMQ’s throughput constraints. When upgrades needed to be calculated for a large number of vehicles simultaneously, significant performance challenges arose, especially during peak load periods.
The weaknesses in performance and stability had to be addressed, as they not only slowed down the update process but also caused significant operational efforts, particularly during nighttime hours. Additionally, the future viability had to be ensured to reliably and securely provide updates to the continuously growing fleet of updatable vehicles.
ConSol quickly identified ActiveMQ as the limiting bottleneck. The ConSol software engineers proposed to the client a gradual replacement of the message broker with the AWS-native queuing service SQS (Simple Queue Service) and developed a corresponding migration plan. To test feasibility, they initially migrated the message broker with just one queue. The result was successful: the expected performance and stability improvements were realized, and the test run was subsequently used as a reference implementation. ConSol gradually replaced all critical ActiveMQ-based queues with SQS queues. Currently, around 60 queues in the production environment facilitate communication between the services.
By switching the message broker to SQS queues, the Remote Software Upgrade product gained significant improvements in stability, availability, and speed. The stability and performance challenges are now a thing of the past, resulting in a noticeable reduction in operational efforts. At the same time, with the transition to SQS as a serverless service, the product has taken a major step toward becoming 'cloud-native.' This enables nearly unlimited scalability and fault tolerance at manageable costs. Resources for update calculation can be easily scaled up when needed.
BMW Group & ConSol: Innovative Partnership
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