How Hybrid Cloud is Driving Success for Karma Automotive

January 29, 2021

Learn how Southern California-based automaker Karma Automotive uses Megaport for hybrid cloud connectivity to design and manufacture state-of-the-art luxury vehicles.

World-class, extended-range, and luxurious: owning a Karma electric car “is about becoming part of a lifestyle that embodies the pursuit of pleasure, and of life”.

Karma Automotive’s innovative technology, customisable design, and groundbreaking safety features are a testament to the company’s uncompromising commitment to challenge habitual thinking about luxury. The cars may look beautifully simple, but all the technology that goes into manufacturing them is complex.

Karma Automotive’s production databases and steady-state workloads are based in colocation facilities, while aerodynamics studies and manufacturing designs are hosted on AWS EC2 instances for High-Performance Computing (HPC). In short, Karma Automotive needed its design and production environments to share real-time data in order to assemble vehicles efficiently.

Read more about Karma Automotive’s hybrid cloud journey.

Megaport’s Network as a Service (NaaS) helped Karma Automotive design a hybrid cloud strategy that streamlined their manufacturing processes from visualisation to design to production.

Fast, Scalable, and Reliable Hybrid Cloud Connectivity

Megaport’s flexible, scalable, and dedicated Software Defined Network (SDN) made it possible for Karma Automotive to simplify the way they move data between their on-premises production workloads and their design environments in the cloud.

Karma Automotive can now run real-time torque measurements in AWS using large compute instances, analytics, and big data applications. They can perform Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations using data from their on-premises and cloud environments. And they can rapidly deploy private on-demand connections between their on-premises and SAP HANA environments across multicloud regions, as well as scale up hundreds of compute instances for HPC in a matter of minutes.

Access to on-demand compute instances means the team can even run simulations in the cloud, extract the data results, deliver back to their on-premises infrastructure, and manipulate the data files on demand.

M930 Karma Automotive Case Study V1.2

Reduced Costs, Faster Time to Market

Karma Automotive’s hybrid cloud strategy modernised their network, creating greater operational agility. It also reduced their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by lowering egress fees thanks to private, direct connectivity to their cloud providers and Megaport’s pay-as-you-go billing model.

Most importantly, speedier, more reliable connectivity between on-premises and cloud workloads allowed for more visualisations, more simulations, and more prototyping, enabling Karma Automotive to bring their ideas to life and deliver their state-of-the-art luxury cars faster than ever before.

We can’t wait to see what they do next.

For more detail on how Megaport helped Karma Automotive unlock the potential of hybrid cloud, read our case study here.