The way in which an organization tackles processes plays an instrumental role in determining whether it’s a make-or-break affair.

By using an enablement layer throughout silos and automating processes, automotive manufacturer Audi AG gains both a transformational and scalability advantage needed to handle 6,600 projects, according to Sebastian Kister (pictured), product team lead, Kubernetes Competence Center, at Audi.

“You need platforms, you need processes and you need to centralize that,” Kister said. “What we promote is something you haven’t heard in the DevSecOps or in the DevOps culture a lot; it’s respect the silo, don’t fight the silos. Leverage the silos … and that way you can automate through the silos. So you have the developer on the left and you have an infrastructure on the right.”

Kister spoke with industry analysts Savannah Peterson and Joep Piscaer at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how automation, Kubernetes, silos and the cloud are propelling Audi’s transformational journey. (* Disclosure below.)

Audi uses a people-first approach

Audi ensures that its use of Kubernetes is successful by using a “people-first” approach. The company does this by emphasizing the importance of adaptation and allowing practitioners to focus on solving problems, according to Kister.

“You need to convince with a great product first, and it’s not like there is a top-down decision process. First, you choose the tech, and then you tell the people what to do,” he stated. “What we do is we gather the most passionate people, we do people-first transformation and let them choose the best tech to solve a problem. If you do process-first transformation, people satisfy processes.”

Audi focuses on the interface security and runtime with the help of an external firm. As a result, Kubernetes comes into the picture based on the automation needed, according to Kister.

“We let the external company or the internal development company … automate through the, for example, OpenShift platform to our infrastructure to the Kubernetes endpoint,” he noted. “So after the Kubernetes endpoint, everything is with us.”

Audis are moving data centers

The data generated by Audis has led to replacing old-school product cycles, such as waterfall engineering, with continuous integration and continuous deployment. As a result, Audis have become mobile data centers thanks to cloud-native and Kubernetes technologies, according to Kister.

“Obviously, in the Audis, we are talking driving data centers now,” he stated. “They are driving data centers; we create petabytes of data every day with our fleet. We’re doing that obviously on Kubernetes with the many development teams that we have in Audi and in the Volkswagen Group.”

The cloud is an ideal stepping stone toward Audi’s transformational journey. As a result, Audi enjoys a cloud-native community, better time-to-market, value addition and the realization of business goals, according to Kister.

“In the cloud, we create like the public transport versus individual mobility use case because you share a data center with many companies,” he noted. “Everybody is investing in cloud-native; its main goal is kind of rockets launching the time-to-market KPI here.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Neither Red Hat Inc. nor other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE