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Today, a typical vehicle is supported by over 100 million lines of code. From infotainment systems and parking assistants to critical braking and crash-avoidance systems, software increasingly defines the modern vehicle, delivering significant benefits to consumers.
But as the amount and complexity of software increases, managing these diverse functions efficiently and securely becomes more challenging. Applications have different dependencies, resource requirements, and lifecycle needs, while software updates must be coordinated across an increasingly complex vehicle architecture.
One solution is containers — lightweight, standalone execution packages that include all application components, including code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and configuration files. Containers provide a standardized way to package and deploy software, simplify software updates, and help isolate applications from one another.
By partitioning software workloads in separate containers by function — e.g., separating navigation services from rear-seat entertainment — automotive engineering teams can ensure these diverse software functions coexist efficiently, while remaining isolated from one another on shared hardware. Orchestrating the lifecycle of the containers, by seamlessly turning them on and off as required, ensures adequate hardware utilization without massive overprovisioning.
Traditional container orchestrators have been used in cloud-native environments for years to deploy and manage containerized software at scale. Kubernetes, in particular, has revolutionized software orchestration by automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications for cloud computing.
Several years ago, an expert Elektrobit team studied the potential of using Kubernetes and cloud-native orchestration concepts in the context of the modern software-defined vehicle (SDV). The team determined that, while container orchestration offers many benefits for automotive development, the characteristics of in-vehicle systems call for a more specialized approach.
Orchestrating the SDV: A Complex Challenge
SDV software development and management present requirements that differ significantly from those of traditional cloud environments:
- Distributed vehicle architectures. Modern SDVs span multiple nodes and virtual machines (VMs) across the vehicle. Automotive software engineers need a unified platform that can deploy, manage, and coordinate workloads consistently and deterministically across this distributed environment.
- Limited resources. The full-featured software functionality and hundreds of features in the modern SDV are already straining available high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The container orchestration platform shouldn’t add significantly to that load. Instead, it must be purpose-built and lightweight.
- Stringent security and compliance requirements. Given the range of apps and vendors supporting the SDV architecture, an open-source platform provides a common foundation for workload orchestration. That platform must also provide the transparency, traceability, and maintainability required by the global automotive industry.
When Elektrobit searched for an open-source solution for our customers, we concluded that none of the existing container orchestrators would meet these specialized needs. So we developed our own: Eclipse Ankaios.
Eclipse Ankaios Delivers a Powerful, Specialized Solution
Invented and built by Elektrobit as part of the Eclipse SDV Working Group, Ankaios is now hosted by the Eclipse Foundation as an open source project. It provides a lightweight workload and container orchestration platform designed for the needs of software-defined vehicles.
Eclipse Ankaios targets the specific requirements of automotive software. It dynamically launches SDV applications as they’re needed, while considering startup dependencies, workload failovers and restarts, and other constraints. It also enables workloads and their configurations to be changed at runtime, providing a flexible orchestration layer for SDVs.
With Eclipse Ankaios, automotive software engineers can leverage a single API to start, stop, configure, and update containers and workloads in the SDV architecture. While based on a central server, Eclipse Ankaios leverages multiple agents to manage individual containers and their associated runtimes, allowing the cluster to span several computing partitions running on the vehicle.
These capabilities help vehicles remain operational and updatable over their long lifespans. But, in supporting software over such a long period, secure maintenance becomes just as important as the initial feature set.
Dynamic, Ongoing Cybersecurity Assurance
Cybersecurity is one of the most pressing concerns for automakers and consumers today, as cybercriminals and hackers grow ever more sophisticated in their attempts to compromise vehicles and automaker backends.
That’s why Eclipse Ankaios is actively maintained by Elektrobit and the open-source community, with security updates and improvements continuously incorporated as new threats and risks emerge. Eclipse Ankaios is developed not only according to established open-source processes, but also automotive software development best practices.
As attackers increasingly use automated and AI-assisted techniques to identify vulnerabilities, Elektrobit also leverages AI-assisted workflows to strengthen security engineering. By combining deep automotive software expertise with modern AI tools, the Eclipse Ankaios team can identify, analyze, validate, and resolve security issues efficiently, while ensuring security decisions remain under the control of experienced engineers.
Transparency is an important part of this process: Elektrobit always publishes security advisories and reports documenting identified issues and their fixes. Where appropriate, Eclipse Ankaios users are informed ahead of public disclosure, allowing security updates to be coordinated and deployed before vulnerability details become publicly available.
Discover the Benefits of Container Orchestration, Designed for Automotive
Elektrobit powers over 5 billion devices in more than 630 million vehicles worldwide, clearly demonstrating our SDV expertise and experience. We developed Eclipse Ankaios as an official Eclipse Foundation SDV project to help advance the state of our entire industry and provide automotive software teams with the benefits of container orchestration in a platform designed for automotive use cases.
At Elektrobit, Eclipse Ankaios is more than an open-source project. It reflects what we’ve learned from bringing modern software practices into the vehicle and working with the automotive community to address the challenges of modern software-defined vehicles.
We continue to develop Eclipse Ankaios together with the community, while helping customers who want to take these concepts into production and need additional tooling, expertise, or long-term support. This allows the open-source project to remain the common foundation, while helping customers leverage Eclipse Ankaios to build the vehicles of tomorrow.
Learn more about the value of Eclipse Ankaios here. If you’d like to explore the value of container orchestration with a platform designed specifically for automotive software, reach out to Elektrobit today.
Explore Ankaios with Elektrobit
Author
Kaloyan RusevSenior Architect
