Scania Scales Its Connected-Vehicle Solution Using AWS

Transportation company Scania had top-of-the-line on-premises servers, but it could not scale enough to keep up with the growing amount of messaging data from its vehicles. Its fleet grew and continues to grow quickly; by the last quarter of 2022, the fleet of trucks that could exchange data with Scania numbered more than 500,000. For 3 years, Scania underwent a complete redesign of its data network, migrating its servers from on premises to Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Using products like AWS Lambda—a service that runs code while eliminating the need to think about servers or clusters—Scania could scale as much as it needed with lower latency and better security. The company also created a new hybrid design using AWS services to keep its network connected to telecom operators.

Founded in 1891, Scania produces trucks and other transport vehicles. In 2011, it started offering connected-truck services for all its trucks—Internet of Things (IoT) products capturing vehicle data in near real time and sending it through Scania’s on-premises data centers. Scania was then able to send new instructions and data back to the vehicles. 

When Scania introduced connected vehicles, the company dealt with about 50 of these data messages per second. But as its customer base and services grew and more services came to rely on this communication format, Scania realized that its on-premises servers were not powerful enough to handle the quickly increasing traffic. By 2019, the number of messages had grown to 2,000 per second. The company scaled its on-premises solution as much as physically possible, but it still could not keep up with the surge of messages. “We hit the roof with the on-premises system,” said Rolf Lagerholm, product owner and senior architect at Scania. 

Scania began searching for an alternative. Going serverless, or using a cloud provider instead of on premises, was appealing, especially because of the better scaling it offered. Lagerholm had used AWS before on another project and had had a positive experience, so he brought the idea to Scania. When the company decided to make its servers virtual, it settled on AWS, and with the new solution, Scania achieved an 80 percent reduction in latency.

The journey to completing a workable redesign was lengthy and slow. “We had to rewrite almost everything that we had,” says Lagerholm. Scania did not want to shut down its services completely and inconvenience its customers, so it could make changes only in small increments. Another setback was that the first redesign Scania developed had high latency, and developers had to create a second redesign, which ultimately used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, in addition to other AWS serverless products. Scania only moved on to proofs of concept and testing by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “We learned a lot,” says Lagerholm. “I don’t think it was wasted time because we dug into the details of all the services that we used. Then, when we started to do other things in the project, it was much easier to take the right step because we knew the services well.” 

One of Scania’s greatest challenges with its AWS redesign was to connect the network to telecom operators, which was a big issue because Scania’s messages are transmitted through 4G networks. Scania needed to address its telecom-connection issue directly. Much was at stake because some of the telecom operators had long histories with Scania and its old on-premises network, and Scania did not want to lose their business. So, the company worked closely with an AWS team to develop a temporary hybrid system, giving the company time to find a solution to maintain the telecom connections. Using AWS Transit Gateway—which connects Amazon VPCs, AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway—Scania could access the telecom connections through its on-premises solution while building its serverless network. Other services provided data storage throughout the transition, like Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, flexible NoSQL database service for single-digit millisecond performance at nearly any scale. Every time a telecom operator was ready, Scania migrated its connection to AWS—one operator at a time. “You can’t buy the setup that we have ‘out of the box,’” says Lagerholm. 

Now that Scania has migrated its entire network, now named the Message Platform, to the cloud, the company has solved its scaling capacity challenge and can scale massively using Amazon EC2 C5 Instances—a service designed for compute-intensive workloads with cost-effective high performance. Scania’s message broker is running on Amazon EC2 C5 Instances behind a load balancer. Scania had scaled up its on-premises system message-load capacity from 50 messages per second to 2,000, and the new cloud-based system can scale up to 20,000 messages per second or more. Other services help make Scania’s new network more flexible, such as Amazon Kinesis, a service that makes it simple to collect, process, and analyze video and data streams in near real time. As such, Amazon Kinesis manages the data coming from connected vehicles. This near-real-time availability of data further helps developers deploy changes in less than 1 week. 

The Message Platform has revealed new avenues where Scania can expand its products, such as the first over-the-air updates for its truck software next year. The network also came with other benefits Scania did not anticipate. Working on the cloud gave the company more access control over its account, making the system more secure than it had been on premises. The system also had very little latency: the average round-trip time for a message using a 4G network was around 250 milliseconds. This low latency facilitates faster changes for the company, helping Scania to deploy changes and updates to its messaging systems several times per week when necessary.

Scania has big plans for the future as it continues enhancing the Message Platform. One plan is to bring its products and software to China and link an AWS account there to its account in Ireland. The company also wants to design a hardware solution and other protocols that it hopes will set the standard for such platforms in the transportation industry. 

To Scania, the time and expense spent going serverless was worth it. “We have gained a lot of flexibility. We are not paying for on premises anymore, but we are doing so much more in AWS. I think you could say we get more bang for the buck,” says Lagerholm.