Honda Builds Serverless Connected Car Platform for Millions of Cars on AWS

Although Honda planned to develop the second-generation platform on its own, the manufacturer decided to adopt AWS Professional Services, aiming to expand its use of the latest AWS services. “The Connected Platform plays a vital role in supporting the safety of automobiles,” says Daiki Nogami, chief of the Honda Global Platform Department, who oversaw development. “We decided that it was best to get expert advice to create a high-quality platform.”

At first, during the design and development phase, Honda received assistance from AWS Professional Services in the form of technical QA. However, the team encountered unexpected challenges in the operational design and implementation phase for production deployment. To get things back on track, AWS Professional Services joined the development team and handled everything from design to implementation, testing, and handover. Thanks to this assistance, the second-generation Connected Platform launched in Thailand, Japan, Europe and India between December 2019 and June 2020.

"AWS Professional Services gave us great advice in areas such as scalable architectures and system recovery and constantly provided proactive suggestions. The project proceeded smoothly thanks to not only their dedicated technical assistance but also their business support," says Takehara.

The second-generation Connected Platform offloads infrastructure management to AWS through serverless architecture and services such as AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda and enables vehicles to communicate bidirectionally with the cloud using AWS IoT Core.

“Because the second-generation platform was designed to handle bidirectional transfer of enormous amounts of data, we chose a serverless architecture which offers flexibility in capacity planning and scaling,” says Nogami. “We use AWS IoT Core for our MQTT broker and for maintenance operations, which provides a secure and scalable environment.”

Honda developed the CI/CD environment for its second-generation Connected Platform using AWS Developer Tools, building a deployment pipeline without having to manage servers. Using AWS CloudFormation to manage infrastructure as code makes it easy to deploy infrastructure globally and manage changes, according to Keisuke Umehara, chief of the Honda Global Platform Department.“To roll out an environment built in Japan to AWS Regions in Europe, Thailand, and India while fulfilling the legal requirements of each area, we needed CI/CD and infrastructure as code,” says Umehara. “AWS CloudFormation made it possible to launch our services quickly because we were able to roll out the same server environment settings to each region, and deployments that normally take two to three months per region took only two weeks.”

Since transitioning to the operational phase, Honda has been using AWS Enterprise Support and Technical Account Managers to get technical and operational guidance and details about service updates. According to Korehide Kitamura, who oversees budget and actual performance control in the Honda Global Platform Department, the manufacturer is particularly fond of the support it receives for ongoing cost optimization.

“Technical Account Managers give advice on reducing costs based on resource usage and infrastructure configurations. We had been using reserved instances (RI) since our first-generation platform but had to purchase them for each account, so they were difficult to manage,” Kitamura says. “As soon as AWS released Savings Plans in 2019, their sales team contacted us, suggesting a plan to reduce costs and showing us the applicable scope. This simplified RI management and enabled us to manage costs for the first- and second-generation platforms.”

Millions of cars around the world are now connected to the Honda Connected Platform with the number of connected vehicles growing continuously as services expand to more models. Considering this situation, Honda is aiming to further reduce costs and expand revenue streams.

“We'll keep optimizing costs via the continuous price reductions and Savings Plans that AWS offers. We currently offer remote control and security call-out services, but we’d also like to add new services to please even more customers,” says Takehara.

Honda has decided to use AWS Professional Services again for the Third Generation Connected Platform for which planning has already begun. Nogami says, “With AWS Professional Services supporting us from the requirement definition and design phase, we'll be able to discuss the best services for our business goals.”