Cloud migration for BRACE Automotive

Introduction

Brace Automotive is active in the specialized domains of powertrain, interior and chassis systems. Their services incorporate mechanical, mechatronics and software aspects in automotive system development and integration.

Challenge

Our cloud team faced several challenges during the cloud migration for BRACE Automotive:

• External hosting of the BRACE Automotive servers
• Secured communicaton between internal devices & external servers
• Active Directory as the single authentication provider for all external servers
• SSH server integration with Active Directory

The solution

Our cloud team started the cloud migration by connecting the BRACE Automotive cloud servers (completely secured) to the on-premises environments through a site-to-site VPN. Besides the known advantages of cloud computing (on-demand access to a large number of directly configurable resources, flexibility, scalability, only pay for use, …), we created extra value for our customer by adding additional integrations to the migration project.

The migrated applications now only use the on-premises Active Directory for authentication and even work over SSH to SVN, fully integrated by linking the private keys within the AD user profiles. The renewed environments were developed according to the DevOps methodology (mostly by using Opscode Chef).

Our cloud migration resulted in the following benefits for BRACE Automotive:

• Improved scalability
• Increased reproducibility
• Flexibility
• Improved availability
• Cost optimization