How Ford Motor Company adopts Kubernetes and Red Hat Openshift?

Ford Motor Company has an online presence to provide mobility solutions at accessible prices to its customers, including dealerships and parts distributors who sell to a variety of retail and commercial consumers. Now, for focusing on their R&D developers has to adapt to something which can reduce the time of maintaining the web-portal and optimize the hardware used, they started using Kubernetes and Openshift for container orchestration. This way they managed to speed delivery and simplify maintenance, the company created a container-based application to modernize its legacy stateful applications and optimize its hardware use. Now, they can focus on exploring new ways to innovate, from big data to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

How was ford benefited?

Improved productivity with the standardized development environment and self-service provisioning, as openshift has great application with CI/CD. It can manage the increase in the workloads deployed using the autoscaling feature with the best rolling out an update strategy.

Enhanced security with enterprise technology from Red Hat and continuous monitoring provided by Sysdig. Sysdig enables companies to confidently run cloud-native workloads in production. With the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform, cloud teams embed security, validate compliance and maximize performance and availability. The Sysdig platform is open by design, with the scale, performance, and usability enterprises demand. The largest companies rely on Sysdig for cloud-native security and visibility.

Significantly reduced hardware costs by running Openshift on bare metal.

Challenge:

Each of Ford’s business units hosts a robust, engaged development community that is focused on building products and services that take advantage of the latest technological innovations, from machine learning for crash analysis and autonomous driving to high-performance computing (HPC) for prototype creation and testing. But this engagement across hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of internal applications and sites created complexity that Ford’s traditional IT environment and development approaches could not accommodate. Even with hypervisors and virtual machines, the company struggled with inefficient resource use and high staffing costs to maintain this environment.

Solution:

Ford sought to use Kubernetes container technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation within its datacenters to give it is legacy stateful applications the benefits of public cloud: faster delivery, easier maintenance, and automated scalability. Consolidating its hardware and software environments with container orchestration would also help the company use its resources more effectively.

After running tests and proofs of concept (POCs) of container technology, Ford began looking for an enterprise partner offering commercially supported open source solutions to help run containers in production and support innovative experimentation.

The company also implemented Red Hat Quay to create a centralized container registry to host and secure all of its container images while offering protected, API-based access to partners and other third parties.

Using OpenShift Container Platform, Ford has accelerated time to market by centralizing and standardizing its application development environment and compliance analysis for a consistent multi-cloud experience. For example, OpenShift’s automation capabilities help Ford deploy new clusters more rapidly.

These improvements are enhanced by the company’s shift from a traditional, waterfall approach to iterative DevOps processes and a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflow.