CASE STUDY

How NIO Built a Cutting Edge Autonomous Vehicle Platform on Top of Containers

Challenges

Scaling compute and storage infrastructure independently as each autonomous vehicle fleet comes online
Storage and data processing for up to 24 TB of data created by each vehicle per day
Containers running on bare metal are the only way to isolate workloads while maintaining performance, but data management in Kubernetes and DC/OS is immature

Solution

Portworx provides a flexible, automated data management layer for apps running on Kubernetes and DC/OS
NIO uses commodity servers for storage to achieve near bare metal performance without sacrificing automation enabled by containers
Portworx provides dynamic provisioning, HA, snapshots, backup, and encryption for databases, machine learning and deep learning scenarios

Result

NIO rapidly scales compute and storage infrastructure independently to meet ramped up vehicle production. NIO takes advantage of the density, resource isolation, and portability of containers, without sacrificing crucial storage and data management capabilities.

There are a few critical areas in your stack where you cannot afford a failure. Storage is one such area. We evaluated open-source options for cloud-native storage, but they were not as stable for our high-performance use case. We chose Portworx because it is a stable, mature, container-native storage option with one of the most responsive engineering and support organizations I’ve ever worked with.”

– Satya Komala, head of autonomous vehicle cloud and enterprise architecture, NIO