Success story
Ford Motor Company optimizes delivery with cloud platform
Overview
Ford Motor Company seeks to provide mobility solutions at accessible prices to its customers, including dealerships and parts distributors. To speed delivery and simplify maintenance, Ford adopted a container-based cloud platform based on Red Hat OpenShift and supported by Sysdig technology to modernize its legacy, stateful applications. With its new platform, Ford achieved an increase in productivity for Containers-as-a-Service support.
With OpenShift, we have a common framework that can be reused for deploying an application or service because every major cloud provider has Kubernetes compatibility. We can now deliver features in a more secure, reliable manner.
Industry
Automotive
Region
NA
Headquarters
Dearborn, Michigan, United States
Size
190,000 employees
Challenge
Achieve innovation for faster delivery
Ford’s business units host a robust, engaged development community. But collaboration between hundreds of thousands of employees and across 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 resources use and high staffing costs. Ford wanted a new environment to help it use its resources more efficiently.
Solution
Use containers with added security to automate
Ford sought to use container technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation in its datacenters to modernize its legacy, stateful applications and optimize its hardware use. After considering several Kubernetes solutions, Ford migrated to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and adopted Red Hat Quay. Ford also partnered with Sysdig technology, a Kubernetes security solution certified by Red Hat, to add extra visibility and protection for development and production.
Software and services
Business outcome
Increase productivity while reducing costs
With the new multitenant Red Hat OpenShift environment, dealers and plant operators gain access to new features, fixes, and updates faster. Now, many processes for stateful workloads take less time, and the company has seen a productivity improvement for Containers-as-a-Service support. Shifting to a container-based approach requires less initial hardware investment—and ongoing savings as Ford continues to modernize and migrate its legacy applications.
We were able to initially run OpenShift on a fleet of hardware that had literally been pulled out of our datacenter to be scrapped. We put that hardware back and are successfully running production OpenShift on it today.
