Based in Amsterdam, TomTom boasts a global team of over 4,500 that make the location technologies relied upon by hundreds of millions of drivers, businesses, and governments. Their mission is to solve the world’s mobility challenges, with innovative solutions to help to address climate change, and reduce road-related accidents.
However, in 2020, it became clear that the homegrown IT infrastructure TomTom had built could no longer handle the capacity needed to meet customer demand. They worked with Microsoft to migrate from on-prem to the cloud and modernize their applications with Azure. More than just a lift-and-shift, TomTom needed a cloud solution that could help with a massive migration and overhaul while not affecting real-time app performance. Microsoft was up to the task and then some.
“Microsoft helped us to achieve seamless scalability and flexibility, remove operational downtime and increase availability and reliability, so we could meet our SLAs.”
Charlotte Saayman, Project Manager in the Service Platform Team, TomTom
Running over capacity
Since changing the way people drive through digital navigation, TomTom has never stopped thinking about how they can improve the way the world moves. Their maps, navigation software, real-time traffic information, and APIs enable smart mobility on a global scale, making the roads safer and the drive easier. Major challenges like increasingly congested roadways motivate them to create new products—as well as refine the ones already in market—to accelerate the adoption of automated, connected, and electric driving.
“We have a huge number of ways to collect map data,” says Hans van Leijen, Director of Applications for the Service Platform at TomTom. “For example, from satellite images, but also from public geographic information sources: big data and data transformation to make reliable maps of the world. Next, we create software that allows you to route and to guide you during your trip. Lastly, we have traffic information, which is all about data sensing, internet of things.”
TomTom collects data from many sources to be able to detect traffic and distribute the data in real time to mobile phones or any type of device that uses navigation software. The world leverages their products, whether it’s in-vehicle navigation systems, personal device navigation systems, or others. That’s why, in 2020, when TomTom recognized that their homegrown server systems could no longer handle the capacity, they knew they needed to migrate to the cloud, and fast.
“We had built our own private cloud solution, based on OpenStack,” reports van Leijen. “We architected it in 2013, but the design of it made it difficult to keep maintaining it properly. At some point we were no longer able to keep all software components up to date. Finding ourselves at a dead-end street meant that we had to modernize the system. However, modernizing carried a lot of risks because the system was already overloaded. It was running beyond what it was designed for. It was overscaled and was no longer stable.”
Rather than trying to modernize and stabilize a system that would no longer be able to support them, they concluded there would be less risk in migrating everything out of their home-grown environment.
The steps to migration
The first step for any company looking to migrate from on-prem to the cloud is to select the best cloud platform to meet their needs. “Microsoft is a strategic partner of TomTom, so it made sense to use them as our Cloud provider since we had a relationship with them already,” says Charlotte Saayman, Project Manager in the Service Platform Team at TomTom. For TomTom, Microsoft checked all their boxes. In order to accelerate their migration, Microsoft assisted TomTom in the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) and were connected with a team of FastTrack Azure engineers. This gave TomTom a dedicated resource to provide migration guidance—helping them plan, configure source environments, and use Microsoft’s data migration services to migrate their data. “The program gave us guidance and advice on creating Landing zones and migrating databases,” reports Saayman.
“AMMP helped us in a number of ways,” says van Leijen. “Microsoft funded part of the project through an implementation partner: LTIMindtree.” LTIMindtree has multiple Azure specializations including Modernization of Web Applications in Azure, Windows & SQL migration to Azure, and Data Warehouse Migration to Azure and were able to address the entire migratable estate. “We built a joint team where LTIMindtree supplied a number of cloud engineers. LTIMindtree, together with Microsoft support, performed the migration with our existing application maintenance teams to ensure knowledge transfer. Microsoft engineers helped in building pipelines, testing and the application cut over to Azure.” Additionally, Microsoft FastTrack gave TomTom access to various experts to help them solve problems that came up.
Even with additional support of AMMP and assistance from a team of engineers, the project took longer than originally predicted. “The migration took 18 months, six months longer than we’d originally planned because it was more work than originally sized,” explains Saayman. The core reason for the increase in time was the sheer number of applications that needed to be migrated. “It entailed working, coordinating, and communicating with 16 different product teams,” continues Saayman. “We had over 4,000 virtual machines and 187 applications, which were migrated over to Azure.”
Another contributing factor to the increased time for migration was that there were components that had to be modernized during the process to capture benefits of the cloud. “We defined an approach that we called ELSA, which stood for Enlightened Lift and Shift to Azure,” reports van Leijen. “ELSA meant that we kept the source code the same, but we did modernize a limited number of aspects about that software. Essentially, we chose to redeploy all software rather than really lifting and shifting it.”
TomTom decided to completely rewrite the whole build and deployment pipelines, because they wanted to standardize them; they completely replaced the database layer from self-managed database software to Azure managed database-as-a-service; and, lastly, TomTom completely replaced all the custom-built monitoring software with a standard software stack of monitoring software based mostly around Prometheus. Ultimately, TomTom’s engineering team couldn’t change core functionality because then the migration project would be less predictable, but they could modernize—the database layer, monitoring layer, and the deploy pipeline.
To date, TomTom has achieved a lot in their partnership with Microsoft FastTrack. For monitoring, they’ve standardized using Prometheus, implemented auto-alerting of all 187 applications in PagerDuty, and application performance is managed by Azure Application Insights. To upgrade deployment, TomTom has utilized new tools in migration: Azure DevOps, Terraform, and Ansible. Additionally, all databases have been consolidated and migrated from various platforms to MySQL and MSSQL, and encrypted data is now managed in Azure Key Vault. With this increased productivity, TomTom can manage their own databases and pull application performance issue analysis. Because of standardization, it’s easier to understand how the pipelines work across teams.
“We have more cost savings, flexibility, and autoscaling. We can provide better service to our customers with less downtime and outages,” says Saayman. “With Microsoft as our partner, the platform engineers have a reduction in operational toil and the time that they have to spend on infrastructure. We can now maximize all of our engineers’ time on being able to build and code products.”
What’s next
As TomTom moves into the future, Azure empowers them to pursue their vision of bringing access to bigger and better services to their customers. “We’re working toward being more efficient and cost effective in the Cloud,” says Saayman. “We want to look at ways to deliver faster and better to results to our customers, and we are working on security improvements in the cloud to be safer and build trust with our partners as well.”
Additionally, TomTom continues to pursue more benefits from Azure. Migrating their product and client data warehouses will enable faster analytics. They’re also working with AMMP to publish all their Azure cost data. Everybody in the team can review Power BI dashboards and see costs, resources, owners, statuses, and all the other resources that are linked to a subscription without needing technical skillsets. TomTom will continue to solve the world’s mobility challenges with Microsoft helping them along the way.
“Having a predictable level of reliability with decreased downtime helps us keep customer satisfaction high and maintain our brand reputation and brand equity.”
Hans van Leijen, Director of Applications for the Service Platform, TomTom
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