Aug 18 2020
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Enhancing customer safety by leveraging the scalable, secure, and cost-optimized Toyota Connected Data Lake

Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), a global automotive manufacturer, has made “connected cars” a core priority as part of its broader transformation from an auto company to a mobility company. In recent years, TMC and its affiliate technology and big data company, Toyota Connected, have developed an array of new technologies to provide connected services that enhance customer safety and the vehicle ownership experience. Today, Toyota’s connected cars come standard with an on-board Data Communication Module (DCM) that links to a Controller Area Network (CAN). By using this hardware, Toyota provides various connected services to its customers.

Some of the connected services help drivers to safely enjoy their cars. Telemetry data is available from the car 24×7, and Toyota makes the data available to its dealers (when their customers opt-in for data sharing). For instance, a vehicle’s auxiliary battery voltage declines over time. With this data, dealership staff can proactively contact customers to recommend a charge prior to experiencing any issues. This automotive telemetry can also help fleet management companies monitor vehicle diagnostics, perform preventive maintenance and help avoid breakdowns.

There are other services such as usage-based auto insurance that leverage driving behavior data that can help safe drivers receive discounts on their car insurance. Telemetry plays a vital role in understanding driver behavior. If drivers choose to opt-in, a safety score can be generated based on their driving data and drivers can use their smartphones to check their safe driving scores.

A vehicle generates data every second, which can be bundled into larger packets at one-minute intervals. With millions of connected cars that have data points available every second, the incredible scale required to capture and store that data is immense—there are billions of messages daily generating petabytes of data. To make this vision a reality, Toyota Connected’s Mobility Team embarked on building a real-time “Toyota Connected Data Lake.” Given the scale, we leveraged AWS to build this platform. In this post, we show how we built the data lake and how we provide significant value to our customers.

Overview

The guiding principles for architecture and design that we used are as follows:

  • Serverless: We want to use cloud native technologies and spend minimal time on infrastructure maintenance.
  • Rapid speed to market: We work backwards from customer requirements and iterate frequently to develop minimally viable products (MVPs).
  • Cost-efficient at scale.
  • Low latency: near real time processing.

Our data lake needed to be able to:

  • Capture and store new data (relational and non-relational) at petabyte scale in real time.
  • Provide analytics that go beyond batch reporting and incorporate real time and predictive capabilities.
  • Democratize access to data in a secure and governed way, allowing our team to unleash their creative energy and deliver innovative solutions.

The following diagram shows the high-level architecture

Walkthrough

We built the serverless data lake with Amazon S3 as the primary data store, given the scalability and high availability of S3. The entire process is automated, which reduces the likelihood of human error, increases efficiency, and ensures consistent configurations over time, as well as reduces the cost of operations.

The key components of a data lake include Ingest, Decode, Transform, Analyze, and Consume:

  • Ingest: Connected vehicles send telemetry data once a minute—which includes speed, acceleration, turns, geo location, fuel level, and diagnostic error codes. This data is ingested into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, processed through AWS Lambda to make it readable, and the “raw copy” is saved through Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose into an S3
  • Decode:  Data arriving into the Kinesis data stream in the ‘Decode’ pillar is decoded by a serverless Lambda function, which does most of the heavy lifting. Based upon a proprietary specification, this Lambda function does the bit-by-bit decoding of the input message to capture the particular sensor values. The small input payload of 35KB with data from over 180 sensors is now decoded and converted to a JSON message of 3 MB. This is then compressed and written to the ‘Decoded S3 bucket’.
  • Transform:  The aggregation jobs leverage the massively parallel capability of Amazon EMR, decrypt the decoded messages and convert the data to Apache Parquet Apache Parquet is a columnar storage file format designed for querying large amounts of data, regardless of the data processing framework, or programming language. Parquet allows for better compression, which reduces the amount of storage required. It also reduces I/O, since we can efficiently scan the data. The data sets are now available for analytics purposes, partitioned by masked identification numbers as well as by automotive models and dispatch type. A separate set of jobs transform the data and store it in Amazon DynamoDB to be consumed in real time from APIs.
  • Consume: Applications needing to consume the data make API calls through the Amazon API Gateway. Authentication to the API calls is based on temporary tokens issued by Amazon Cognito.
  • Analyze: Data analytics can be directly performed off Amazon S3 by leveraging serverless Amazon Athena. Data access is democratized and made available to data science groups, who build and test various models that provide value to our customers.

Additionally, comprehensive monitoring is set up by leveraging Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ES, and AWS KMS for managing the keys securely.

Scalability

The scalability capabilities of the building blocks in our architecture that allow us to reach this massive scale are:

  • S3: S3 is a massively scalable key-based object store that is well-suited for storing and retrieving large datasets. S3 partitions the index based on key name. To maximize performance of high-concurrency operations on S3, we introduced randomness into each of the Parquet object keys to increase the likelihood that the keys are distributed across many partitions.
  • Lambda: We can run as many concurrent functions as needed and can raise limits as required with AWS support.
  • Kinesis Firehose: It scales elastically based on volume without requiring any human intervention. We batch requests up to 128MiB or 15 minutes, whichever comes earlier to avoid small files. Additional details are available in Srikanth Kodali’s blog post.
  • Kinesis Data Streams: We developed an automated program that adjusts the shards based on incoming volume. This is based on the Kinesis Scaling Utility from AWS Labs, which allows us to scale in a way similar to EC2 Auto Scaling groups.
  • API Gateway: automatically scales to billions of requests and seamlessly handles our API traffic.
  • EMR cluster: We can programmatically scale out to hundreds of nodes based on our volume and scale in after processing is completed.

Our volumes have increased seven-fold since we migrated to AWS and we have only adjusted the number of shards in Kinesis Data Streams and the number of core nodes for EMR processing to scale with the volume.

Security in the AWS cloud

AWS provides a robust suite of security services, allowing us to have a higher level of security in the AWS cloud. Consistent with our security guidelines, data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Additionally, we use VPC Endpoints, allowing us to keep traffic within the AWS network.

Data protection in transit:

Data protection at rest:

  • S3 server-side encryption handles all encryption, decryption and key management transparently. All user data stored in DynamoDB is fully encrypted at rest, for which we use an AWS-owned customer master key at no additional charge. Server-side encryption for Kinesis Data streams and Kinesis Data Firehose is also enabled to ensure that data is encrypted at rest.

Cost optimization

Given our very large data volumes, we were methodical about optimizing costs across all components of the infrastructure. The ultimate goal was to figure out the cost of the APIs we were exposing. We developed a robust cost model validated with performance testing at production volumes:

  • NAT gateway: When we started this project, one of the significant cost drivers was traffic flowing from Lambda to Kinesis Data Firehose that went over the NAT gateway, since Kinesis Data Firehose did not have a VPC endpoint. Traffic flowing through the NAT gateway costs $0.045/GB, whereas traffic flowing through the VPC endpoint costs $0.01/GB. Based on a product feature request from Toyota, AWS implemented this feature (VPC Endpoint for Firehose) early this year. We implemented this feature, which resulted in a four-and-a-half-fold reduction in our costs for data transfer.
  • Kinesis Data Firehose: Since Kinesis Data Firehose did not support encryption of data at rest initially, we had to use client-side encryption using KMS–this was the second significant cost driver. We requested a feature for native server-side encryption in Kinesis Data Firehose. This was released earlier this year and we enabled server-side encryption on the Kinesis Data Firehose stream. This removed the Key Management Service (KMS), resulting in another 10% reduction in our total costs.

Since Kinesis Data Firehose charges based on the amount of data ingested ($0.029/GB), our Lambda function compresses the data before writing to Kinesis Data Firehose, which saves on the ingestion cost.

  • S3– We use lifecycle policies to move data from S3 (which costs $0.023/GB) to Amazon S3 Glacier (which costs $0.004/GB) after a specified duration. Glacier provides a six-fold cost reduction over S3. We further plan to move the data from Glacier to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (which costs $0.00099/GB), which will provide us a four-fold reduction over Glacier costs. Additionally, we have set up automated deletes of certain data sets at periodic intervals.
  • EMR– We were planning to use AWS Glue and keep the architecture serverless, but made the decision to leverage EMR from a cost perspective. We leveraged spot instances for transformation jobs in EMR, which can provide up to 60% savings. The hourly jobs complete successfully with spot instances, however the nightly aggregation jobs leveraging r5.4xlarge instances failed frequently as sufficient spot capacity was not available. We decided to move to “on-demand” instances, while we finalize our strategy for “reserved instances” to reduce costs.
  • DynamoDB: Time to Live (TTL) for DynamoDB lets us define when items in a table expire so that they can be automatically deleted from the database. We enabled TTL to expire objects that are not needed after a certain duration. We plan to use reserved capacity for read and write control units to reduce costs. We also use DynamoDB auto scaling ,which helps us manage capacity efficiently, and lower the cost of our workloads because they have a predictable traffic pattern. In Q2 of 2019, DynamoDBremoved the associated costs of DynamoDB Streams used in replicating data globally, which translated to extra cost savings in global tables.
  • Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator(DAX):  Our DynamoDB tables are front-ended by DAX, which improves the response time of our application by dramatically reducing read latency, as compared to using DynamoDB. Using DAX, we also lower the cost of DynamoDB by reducing the amount of provisioned read throughput needed for read-heavy applications.
  • Lambda: We ran benchmarks to arrive at the optimal memory configuration for Lambda functions. Memory allocation in Lambda determines CPU allocation and for some of our Lambda functions, we allocated higher memory, which results in faster execution, thereby reducing the amount of GB-seconds per function execution, which saves time and cost. Using DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) from  Lambda has several benefits for serverless applications that also use DynamoDB. DAX can improve the response time of your application by dramatically reducing read latency, as compared to using DynamoDB. For serverless applications, combining Lambda with DAX provides an additional benefit: Lower latency results in shorter execution times, which means lower costs for Lambda.
  • Kinesis Data Streams: We scale our streams through an automated job, since our traffic patterns are fairly predictable. During peak hours we add additional shards and delete them during the off-peak hours, thus allowing us to reduce costs when shards are not in use

Enhancing customer safety

The Data Lake presents multiple opportunities to enhance customer safety. Early detection of market defects and pinpointing of target vehicles affected by those defects is made possible through the telemetry data ingested from the vehicles. This early detection leads to early resolution way before the customer is affected. On-board software in the automobiles can be constantly updated over-the-air (OTA), thereby saving time and costs. The automobile can generate a Health Check Report based on the driving style of its drivers, which can create the ideal maintenance plan for drivers for worry-free driving.

The driving data for an individual driver based on speed, sharp turns, rapid acceleration, and sudden braking can be converted into a “driver score” which ranges from 1 to 100 in value. The higher the driver-score, the safer the driver. Drivers can view their scores on mobile devices and monitor the specific locations of harsh driving on the journey map. They can then use this input to self-correct and modify their driving habits to improve their scores, which will not only result in a safer environment but drivers could also get lower insurance rates from insurance companies. This also gives parents an opportunity to monitor the scores for their teenage drivers and coach them appropriately on safe driving habits. Additionally, notifications can be generated if the teenage driver exceeds an agreed-upon speed or leaves a specific area.

Summary

The automated serverless data lake is a robust scalable platform that allows us to analyze data as it becomes available in real time. From an operations perspective, our costs are down significantly. Several aggregation jobs that took 15+ hours to run, now finish in 1/40th of the time. We are impressed with the reliability of the platform that we built. The architectural decision to go serverless has reduced operational burden and will also allow us to have a good handle on our costs going forward. Additionally, we can deploy this pipeline in other geographies with smaller volumes and only pay for what we consume.

Our team accomplished this ambitious development in a short span of six months. They worked in an agile, iterative fashion and continued to deliver robust MVPs to our business partners. Working with the service teams at AWS on product feature requests and seeing them come to fruition in a very short time frame has been a rewarding experience and we look forward to the continued partnership on additional requests.

 

About the Authors


Sandeep Kulkarni drives Cloud Strategy and Architecture for Fortune 500 companies. His passion is to accelerate digital transformation for customers and build highly scalable and cost-effective solutions in the cloud. In his spare time, he loves to do yoga and gardening.

 

 

 

 

Shravanthi Denthumdas is the director of mobility services at Toyota Connected.Her team is responsible for building the Data Lake and delivering services that allow drivers to safely enjoy their cars. In her spare time, she likes to spend time with her family and children.

 

 

 

 

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