FAW Group’s Cloud‑Native Transformation: Microservices, Containerization, and DevOps in the Automotive Industry

Since December 2018, the Cloud Native Technology Practice Alliance (CNBPA) has been collecting outstanding cloud‑native practice cases from various industries. This article presents one of the best cases: the digital transformation of China First Automobile Group (FAW) using cloud‑native technologies.

01. Building a Technology Middle‑Platform – FAW, one of China’s largest automobile manufacturers, aims to become an agile, internet‑style digital enterprise. To achieve this, it launched a technology middle‑platform in 2018 based on containers, DevOps, microservices, and cloud‑native architectures, providing a unified support platform for all digital business.

02. Microservice Platform Empowering New Business Scenarios – Leveraging Tencent’s microservice solution TSF, FAW migrated its existing microservice development and deployment environment to a private, container‑based platform. TSF offers service governance, lifecycle management, configuration, distributed transactions, and observability (logs, monitoring, alerts, tracing). The migration turned many monolithic applications into independent microservices, supporting high‑concurrency, high‑throughput car‑networking scenarios and ensuring high availability and security.

FAW’s smart‑connected platform now runs nearly 100 microservices in test environments and is expected to host about 240 services in production, with over 1,000 microservices covering car‑networking, marketing, and office collaboration.

03. Over 50% of New Projects Adopt Containerization – By 2019, more than half of FAW’s newly initiated IT projects were deployed on containers using the TKE (Tencent Kubernetes Engine) platform, which provides full Kubernetes cluster management, service management, configuration, and image handling. The company operates more than eight K8s clusters, over 2,000 containers, and consumes more than 3,000 CPU cores.

04. DevOps Driving Massive IT Productivity Gains – FAW introduced an internally built DevOps toolchain based on open‑source components, unifying development and operations environments. The platform now performs over 500 builds per day, pushes more than 80 container images, manages over 400 code repositories, and processes over 800 lines of code daily, resulting in a significant boost in IT productivity.

Future plans include building a multi‑cloud platform that integrates PaaS and DBaaS services, enabling seamless cross‑cloud application migration.

The article also announces a upcoming "Kube‑OVN Network Operations" live class (April 9, 20:00‑21:00), inviting readers to scan the QR code to register.