Case Study

Geely, one of China's largest automotive groups (owner of Volvo Cars, Polestar, Lotus, and more), operates a connected vehicle platform that supports over 10 million vehicles. This platform handles mission-critical data streams—from real-time telemetry and remote control commands to vehicle health monitoring. Managing this at scale in a hybrid cloud environment posed unique challenges:

• Unpredictable Traffic Peaks: Rush hours, new vehicle launches, and even weather events cause massive, sudden spikes in vehicle-to-cloud communication. Traditional Kafka's inflexible scaling made it difficult to respond quickly enough, risking service degradation for time-sensitive commands.
• Hybrid Cloud Complexity: The platform spans both public cloud and on-premises data centers. Operating legacy Kafka consistently across these environments—with different storage systems, networking, and operational tooling—was a major source of complexity and risk.
• Data Retention Constraints: Regulations and internal requirements mandate long-term retention of vehicle data. Kafka's reliance on expensive local disks made indefinite retention financially and operationally impractical, forcing difficult trade-offs.

Geely chose AutoMQ to build a unified, resilient streaming backbone for their connected vehicle future.

• Instant Elasticity for Safety-Critical Workloads: AutoMQ's stateless brokers scale in seconds, not hours. When traffic surges—whether from a new model launch or a coordinated remote update—the platform responds instantly, ensuring commands like remote unlocking or emergency rescue are never delayed.
• Hybrid Cloud Native: AutoMQ's architecture, built on S3-compatible object storage, provides a consistent experience across public cloud and on-premises environments. Geely can operate the same software, use the same operational playbooks, and achieve the same elasticity regardless of where the data resides.
• Unlimited, Cost-Effective Retention: By offloading data persistence to object storage, AutoMQ enables Geely to retain vehicle data indefinitely at a fraction of the cost of local disks. This satisfies regulatory requirements without breaking the bank or creating operational headaches.

A Rock-Solid Foundation for the Connected Vehicle Era

AutoMQ has been in production at Geely for over three years, proving its stability at scale.

• Mission-Critical Reliability: For over three years, AutoMQ has reliably supported Geely's 10-million-vehicle fleet, handling traffic peaks from new launches and seasonal events without a hitch. The platform ensures that safety-critical commands are delivered instantly.
• Unified Hybrid Cloud Operations: The team now operates a single, consistent streaming platform across all environments. This simplification has drastically reduced operational complexity and allowed engineers to focus on building better connected vehicle experiences.
• Future-Proof Data Strategy: With data retention decoupled from expensive local storage, Geely can now meet all regulatory and business requirements for data retention without the operational burden of managing massive, stateful Kafka clusters.