Daimler embraces the cloud to innovate faster

By Peter Rothlaender, Manager of Cloud Solutions, Daimler AG

For more than a century, Daimler has been known as one of the world’s most successful automotive manufacturers, with prestigious brands like Mercedes-Benz cars and Freightliner trucks. But today, we are becoming a software company, too. Software plays a big role in today’s connected cars, and with all the telemetry data we can potentially collect from our vehicles, we’re offering new software services, such as fleet management services.

To be world-class in the software arena, we have to move fast. We’re no longer only competing against other auto manufacturers but against companies like Google and Amazon, which move at lightning speed.

We have thousands of software engineers here and work with thousands of subcontractors. When a new project kicked off, it took too long to onboard new developers—historically, it could take months to order and provision servers in our datacenters and days or weeks to set up developers with licenses to dev/test tools. It was also difficult to share our on-premises tools with external people and to create matching development and production environments.

By early 2016, we knew that we needed a higher-velocity software development model, and we also wanted to stop buying, managing, and running our own development and test infrastructure. We have a close relationship with Microsoft, and had many workloads running in Azure, so we talked to Microsoft about creating a reproduceable development environment in Azure.

That’s when Microsoft introduced us to Azure DevTest Labs, then under development. We jumped on board from day one as an early customer, providing ideas and feedback. DevTest Labs provides standardized templates for creating dev/test environments and easy access to all needed tools. And it’s completely open source–friendly, which is critical to us, because we’re a Java shop for the most part.

We were surprised at the degree to which Microsoft was embracing open source; our open-source–oriented developers have been uniformly surprised at how easy it is to use. We’ve brought Java, Tomcat, Docker containers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, and many other open-source tools into DevTest Labs, and they all work great. 

Since using Azure DevTest Labs, we’ve seen our developer onboarding process drop from weeks to hours. We just send developers a link, and they get instant access to Azure Virtual Machines, Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services), and needed open-source tools.

In fact, we worked with Microsoft Consulting Services to create our own custom development environment called Daimler DevCloud. It bundles Azure DevTest Labs, Azure DevOps, and some of the Azure security and operations management services, such as Log Analytics and Application Insights. DevCloud has everything developers need to build, test, and deploy their code in one place. Finally, it’s push-button easy to use, so they’re productive immediately.

When a developer has a new idea and wants to create a proof of concept, they just go to DevCloud and can be coding in minutes. We’re a lot faster in trying out stuff and bringing a team up to speed, which means faster time-to-market with new products.

Offering state-of-the-art development services and an extraordinary collaboration with Microsoft helps us attract the best and the brightest, which is critical in our new role as a software development company. We can demonstrate that we have modern tools and development environments, and have a seat at the table with Microsoft when it comes to pushing Azure to the next level, which most startups can’t offer.

Today, we have about 700 developers using Azure DevTest Labs, and we’re working to get more developers using it. We’re preconfiguring specialized environments for websites, Kubernetes clusters, and other needs in DevTest Labs, which will help attract a lot more projects.

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