Speeding Up the Migration of 1,300+ Microservices Using AWS EBA with BMW’s Connected Company

BMW offers digital services, such as near real-time traffic information and navigation, in its 23 million connected vehicles. Over 14 million My BMW and Mini app users enjoy seamless digital experiences using BMW’s remote services. These services use the ConnectedDrive backend, which was developed and is operated by BMW’s Connected Company division. The backend used on-premises virtual servers initially and Kubernetes containers later.

With the steady growth of digital service usage, and thus request and data volumes, BMW needed to change its infrastructure. “We wanted to stay highly available, resilient, and reliable in the future, continuing to provide our premium digital services at scale,” says Sascha Kallin, coleader of the migration journey supporting all DevOps teams of the Connected Company at BMW.

BMW planned its large-scale migration in three stages—preparation, migration, and optimization. To align the transformation efforts with its strategic objectives, BMW used AWS EBA—a structured approach to building cloud capability and driving organizational change that prioritizes achieving specific, measurable business outcomes.

Thus, different product teams worked together to migrate the backends of their respective microservices. In the preparation stage, BMW set up a migration process and guidelines and defined central standardized reference architectures. It also established central services shared across all BMW product teams, such as continuous integration and delivery pipelines, application performance monitoring, log analytics, and alarming.

To facilitate the migration and realize the desired outcomes, BMW leaned on its own DevOps teams, its DevOps partners, and AWS Professional Services. Using the AWS EBA framework as an integral part of the migration process, the team built reusable infrastructure-as-code components for common service needs among product teams and created standardized blueprints and automation for cloud deployment.

BMW also organized cloud training sessions to provide hands-on support and custom training to solve specific business challenges. The company used the AWS Well-Architected Framework to align its reference architectures and blueprints with AWS best practices (see figure 1). “The AWS EBA methodology played a critical role in bringing together all the pieces—enablement, planning, and follow-through,” says Kallin.

During several EBA events, BMW worked alongside its DevOps partners and AWS to create the fundamental building blocks, establish the framework and automated workflows, and rapidly migrate over 1,300 microservices. It aimed to migrate underlying microservices at least up to integration stage, resolving blockers quickly with the help of all involved teams, and each EBA accelerated the migration of different digital products and services for BMW. “You cannot imagine the happiness and motivation to tackle the next challenges when people saw their functionality running in AWS in an integration stage at the end of each EBA,” says Kallin.

Because of close collaboration and workflow efficiency, the teams migrated an average of five applications, consisting of several microservices each, in monthly EBAs at the migration’s peak. “We received great support from AWS solutions architects and consultants,” says Kallin. “And product teams collaborated to resolve challenges.” The EBAs also familiarized the product teams with cloud operations, transforming their initial concerns into confidence. “After being part of EBAs and handling tasks themselves, people understood each block of technology that made the whole functionality available,” says Kallin.

By mid-2023, BMW had successfully migrated over 1,300 microservices to AWS, meeting the 3-year timeline. Thus, the company became able to process 14 billion daily requests. The ConnectedDrive backend now runs on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a fully managed Kubernetes service—and uses AWS services for compute, storage, databases, messaging, and security.

By adopting the EBA framework and upskilling its product teams, BMW maintained high quality and progressed on its cloud journey, now using various AWS technologies for modernization and innovation. It modernized its customer messaging system using Amazon Aurora Serverless v2—an on-demand, automatic-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora—which provides high performance and availability at global scale. The system can now handle over 10 million messages hourly.

Using the serverless solution, BMW minimized downtime and costs while benefiting from automatic scaling. The company also developed a generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant using Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models—to streamline its cloud infrastructure management. The assistant helped reduce analysis time from hours to minutes while optimizing costs and resource usage.

BMW’s connected vehicles increased to over 23 million in 2025, and its applications process over 197 TB of data and 14 billion messages daily. With the upcoming Neue Klasse vehicle in 2025, BMW expects a further increase in request and data volume. BMW now has the scalability to handle the current and future growing data traffic while maintaining security and resilience and delivering 99.95 percent uptime. “Customers can continue to enjoy the innovative features they are used to on a large scale, and cloud technologies have a significant role in making this possible,” says Kallin.

In the final stage of its migration, modernization, and innovation strategy, BMW is set to optimize its solution for cost and achieve even higher reliability, performance, and developer productivity while accelerating innovation with AI. “We can deliver new functionality quicker,” says Kallin. “We will use the possibilities of the cloud to continuously provide new opportunities for our customers.”