BOSCH increased vehicle safety using AZURE KUBERNETES SERVICES
When Robert Bosch GmbH set out to solve the problem of drivers going the wrong way on highways, the goal was to save lives. The result is the wrong-way driver warning service and software development kit. Designed for use by app developers and original equipment manufacturers, the architecture pivots on an innovative map-matching algorithm and the scalability of Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service in tandem with Azure HDInsight tools that integrate with the Apache Kafka streaming platform.
The wrong-way problem.
The question was how to build real-time data ingestion and processing pipeline capable of returning notifications to drivers within seconds. The team assumed that devices emitting location information, such as smartphone apps and automotive head units, could eventually send thousands of data points to the solution per second, from all over Europe and eventually other countries. Thanks to the trusted partnership Bosch had with Microsoft, Azure Kubernetes Service was the obvious choice. A team of Microsoft cloud solution architects worked closely with Bosch engineers, who provided valuable feedback to Azure product teams.
In addition, by running their solution on Azure and AKS, the average time to calculate whether a driver is going the wrong way could be improved to approximately 60 milliseconds. The team was also interested in exploring other Azure services, such as solutions for managing APIs and security.
How the solution works
The wrong-way driver warning solution runs as a service on Azure and provides an SDK. The SDK maintains a list of hotspots within which GPS data is collected anonymously. Today the solution ingests approximately 6 million requests per day from devices emitting GPS data or from a partner’s back-end system. The WDW service on Azure does the rest.
When a driver using a WDW-configured app or in-car system enters a hotspot, the WDW SDK begins to collect GPS signals and sensor events, such as acceleration and rotational data and heading information.
An architecture for wrong-way driving
The point of ingress for the WDW service is Azure API Management, which works in combination with Azure App Gateway, a managed global load-balancing service that can perform Layer-7 routing and SSL termination. We really enjoyed having Azure on our side because we could just spin up the service and route. The entire service is deployed using a CI/CD pipeline essentially lifted from on-premises and moved to Azure.
Getting accuracy from unreliable GPS data
The team’s biggest technical challenge was to improve the reliability of the incoming GPS data. Bosch developed a custom sensor data-fusion and map-matching algorithm to verify a driver’s location and driving direction.
The team also used the following services
Azure API Management provides the gateway to the back end. Azure App Service was used to build and host multiple internal front ends used by the team for debugging and monitoring. Azure Databricks is an Apache Spark-based analytics platform designed to support team collaboration.
What we like about AKS is the simplified Kubernetes experience. It clicks and deploy, it’s click and scale. It’s infrastructure as code too, which is quite cool for us. ~Christian Jeschke: product owner Bosch
