Volkswagen Financial Services transforms development practice, delivers more value with Azure Stack Hub

80 web applications, 10 countries, one hybrid cloud

There is more to Volkswagen than great cars and campervans. The Volkswagen Group is a global collection of discrete business units, and for more than 70 years, Volkswagen Financial Services has provided banking, leasing, insurance and servicing, mobility, and payment solutions to consumers and businesses—supporting them to buy and lease VW vehicles and fleets.

To help deliver high-quality financial products and services across more than 10 countries, VW Financial Services runs more than 80 self-developed .NET and Java applications in owned datacenters. These support workloads such as consumer online banking, lease calculation, and car fleet management. The business unit wanted to deliver stable, high-performing web applications to VW dealers, partners, and buyers faster and more often. It also sought to build in flexibility for any future business requirements. To do this, VW Financial Services needed to replace in-house maintenance and traditional development methods with cloud-native development models and modern DevOps practices. At the same time, because it’s a financial enterprise, VW Financial Services had to keep data on-premises to comply with internal regulations.

A flexible platform

To reduce infrastructure costs, accelerate development cycles, and add capacity, stability, and agility to its application platform, VW Financial Services adopted a Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud approach to application development and operations using Azure Stack Hub. With its new hybrid platform, the business unit has built a modern, flexible development practice that’s ready to meet changing business needs.

“We needed more speed, more flexibility, and lower costs,” says Jens Ewelt, Head of Department for Azure Services at Volkswagen Financial Services. “But most of our apps were heavily customized, and we wanted to keep our core databases and SAP systems on-premises. So, we needed an adaptable, wide-reaching hybrid cloud platform like Azure Stack Hub.”

VW Financial Services wants to move its web applications from a traditional Microsoft Internet Information Services web server to Azure Stack Hub. This would help bring cloud capabilities to its on-premises data and the ability to add new services as necessary—without the intense effort of reworking existing applications. “Rearchitecting our apps would be more effort than we could commit to,” says Carsten Beckmann, Azure Project Lead at Volkswagen Financial Services. “With Azure Stack Hub, we didn’t need to rework our solutions for a public cloud, and we could still take advantage of cloud-native technologies like serverless computing.”

Developers at VW Financial Services have also adopted Azure DevOps to build continuous integration, continuous delivery pipelines, and to establish other cloud-native early development processes. They use Azure Stack Hub and platform resources like Azure App Service to support development, acceptance, and production operations in cloud and on-premises environments.

“A fully managed appliance with Azure Stack allows us to focus on applications and IaaS or PaaS offerings instead of maintaining complex infrastructure environments,” says Steffen Seifert, Azure Lead Architect at Volkswagen Financial Services.

“We’ve created a far smoother dev pipeline using Azure,” says Carsten Beckmann. “With Azure Stack Hub and Azure DevOps, we have more opportunities for automation plus ready-to-use templates for our developers. It’s a much faster environment to work in, and we can reduce operation costs by empowering developers to scale and size their own environments.”

The automobile financer plans to extend its use of Azure Stack Hub to further boost developer velocity and improve application performance and flexibility by running other cloud services on Azure Stack Hub. These include App Service, Azure Web Apps, and Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor that provides code-level monitoring of application usage, availability, and performance. “We will host many of our .NET apps on Azure App Service instead of virtual machines,” says Carsten Beckmann. “And we expect to increase our use of Azure platform resources on Azure Stack Hub so that we can make more scalable applications really quickly.”

Faster, more agile development processes

With its new hybrid cloud approach, VW Financial Services benefits from faster, more flexible, future-proved applications. “We’ve transformed our development speed, scale, and time to delivery,” says Jens Ewelt. “With Azure Stack Hub, we can deliver services faster, more consistently, at scale, and at a lower cost.”

Using the new approach, VW Financial Services developers have transformed the way they create new applications and manage existing projects. Developers still collaborate with other departments, but they no longer need to coordinate with those colleagues to deploy their code. They now have more independence and control over when and how they release.

Moreover, developers aren’t the only employees who have seen changes. Where multiple teams used to each manage separate workloads such as backup, firewalling, sizing, and capacity, now the entire IT and development organization rallies around the new DevOps environment and an entirely different—and much easier to manage—approach to development and operations.

“Adding Azure Stack Hub has helped us adopt a new organizational approach,” says Jens Ewelt. “We’ve got much closer communications between teams. And with Azure DevOps, everyone feels like one department now, sharing the responsibility as well as the speed and scalability of our new app environments.”

Find out more about Volkswagen Financial Services on Facebook and LinkedIn.