Kuksa: A Cloud-Native Architecture for Enabling Continuous Delivery in the Automotive Domain

TL;DR

This paper presents Kuksa, a cloud-native microservices architecture for automotive platforms that enhances reliability and scalability, enabling continuous over-the-air software updates and resilient service management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel microservices-based architecture for automotive cloud platforms and demonstrates its effectiveness through experimental evaluation.

Findings

The architecture supports reliable over-the-air software delivery.

Microservices enable service interruption without affecting others.

The approach improves scalability and fault tolerance in automotive cloud services.

Abstract

Connecting vehicles to cloud platforms has enabled innovative business scenarios while raising new quality concerns, such as reliability and scalability, which must be addressed by research. Cloud-native architectures based on microservices are a recent approach to enable continuous delivery and to improve service reliability and scalability. We propose an approach for restructuring cloud platform architectures in the automotive domain into a microservices architecture. To this end, we adopted and implemented microservices patterns from literature to design the cloud-native automotive architecture and conducted a laboratory experiment to evaluate the reliability and scalability of microservices in the context of a real-world project in the automotive domain called Eclipse Kuksa. Findings indicated that the proposed architecture could handle the continuous software delivery over-the-air by sending automatic control messages to a vehicular setting. Different patterns enabled us to make changes or interrupt services without extending the impact to others. The results of this study provide evidences that microservices are a potential design solution when dealing with service failures and high payload on cloud-based services in the automotive domain.