Modern cloud-native software-defined vehicle (SDV) development toolchain
Autonomous and connected SDVs open a whole new world of functionality, serviceability, and reliability. With hardware and software decoupled, OEMs can now develop independent applications to address specific functions and services, making it much easier to update or add software to the overall vehicle platform. So, automobile makers and their suppliers are forced to adjust their automotive operations to allow agile software development cycles. The agile development cycles are more flexible and adaptable to shorter development cycles, frequent releases, and focus on collaboration and continuous improvement.
Current challenges with a cloud-native SDV toolchain
The current approach to software development in the automotive sector is organized by vehicle function, such as powertrain, infotainment, or safety. Each area might use different tooling and processes, because of which several challenges, such as the following, arise:
- Scattered tools across the OEM landscape.
- Lack of agility in software development.
- Inefficient and costly integration of software components from different domains and suppliers.
- Limited collaboration and reuse of software across vehicle models and platforms.
- Difficulty in ensuring software quality, security and compliance.
- Restricted innovation opportunities for third-party application development.
These challenges reduce the ability to deliver new features and services.
Benefits of a cloud-native SDV toolchain
Microsoft proposes a plug-and-play approach that is open and configurable. Our approach leverages the existing developer-centric products and services with additional functionality specific to automotive. The plug-and-play approach provides the following benefits:
- Reduces the time to onboard new developers and increases code quality with the usage of generative AI.
- Accelerates the development, testing and validation of automotive software by shifting-left: Testing earlier and more often in the development process to improve software quality and development speed.
- Reduces reliance on real in-vehicle silicon with highly configurable and flexible virtual electronic control Unit (vECU) and virtual high performance compute (vHPC) environments on Azure.
- Allows partners to monetize their development IP by offering tools and virtual devices in the Azure and GitHub marketplaces.
- Ensures compatibility with edge/in-vehicle silicon by offering equivalent compute on Azure.
- Supports the validation process by having a common infrastructure for deploying software artifacts from software-in-the-loop (SIL) to test fleets and collecting feedback to drive changes to the software.
Reference architecture
The reference architecture leverages our developer and DevOps assets to create a flexible and composable toolchain that allows developers to quickly and efficiently test and validate software against virtual ECUs and HPCs in the cloud. Further, the toolchain helps developers to deploy their solutions in hardware-in-the-loop and validation fleets.
The reference architecture includes the following main blocks:
- Development tooling uses proven Microsoft tools to increase developer productivity and collaboration such as GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Dev Box and Visual Studio Code. These tools are extensible with automotive-specific functionality from partners.
- The SDV development, validation, and integration solution provides orchestration services that manage deployment environments and target configurations to manage virtual ECUs and HPCs in the cloud for development, validation, and testing.
- Azure services provide foundational capabilities, such as deployment environments, compute virtualization, and data storage. Microsoft Fabric provides data and analytics services.
- Azure networking provides connectivity to on-premises, hardware-in-the-loop validation environments.
- The Azure and GitHub marketplaces simplify the process of integrating partner offerings for tooling and virtual images in their development toolchain.
Enabling Microsoft technologies
Key Microsoft technologies that enable the SDV reference architecture include:
| Enabling technology | Description |
|---|---|
| GitHub | GitHub is a development platform that provides you with the capability to host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside developers inside your organization and outside. |
| Azure Deployment Environments | Azure Deployment Environments empowers development teams to quickly and easily spin up app infrastructure with project-based templates that establish consistency and best practices while maximizing security. |
| Microsoft Dev Box | Microsoft Dev Box provides developers with self-service access to ready-to-code, cloud-based workstations—known as dev boxes—that can be customized with project-specific tools, source code, and prebuilt binaries for immediate workflow integration. |
| Azure Compute | Microsoft Azure Compute is a comprehensive suite of cloud services from the Microsoft Azure platform that empowers developers to run their applications and workloads on virtual machines (VMs) or containers. It offers a wide array of compute varieties, including memory-optimized, CPU-optimized, high-performance, and general-purpose. |
| Azure Arc | Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help you build applications and services. |
| Azure Blob Storage | A Massively scalable object storage for any type of unstructured data-images, videos, audio, documents, and more-easily and cost-effectively. |
| Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration. |
Next steps
Get started with the following article:
You can then refer to the following article:
- Learn more about the Automotive messaging, data & analytics reference architecture