Amazon Web Services. (AWS), announced that it has entered into an agreement with Ferrari S.p.A. to become their Official Cloud, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence Provider. Together, the companies will accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire Ferrari organisation, including their road cars department, GT Competitions, the Ferrari Challenge, and the Scuderia Ferrari FORMULA 1 (F1) team. Ferrari will use AWS’s breadth and depth of services and proven global infrastructure, including the AWS Europe (Milan) region, to streamline the design and testing of its cars, giving customers the most exciting driving experiences possible. In addition, Scuderia Ferrari will leverage AWS to launch a digital fan engagement platform, via its mobile app, to engage hundreds of millions of fans worldwide with exclusive, personalised content.
As a manufacturer of some of the world’s highest-performing cars, Ferrari will rely on AWS’s advanced analytics, machine learning, compute, storage, and database capabilities to rapidly achieve insights into car design and performance on the road and track. Ferrari will leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with a range of specialised instance types for efficient high-performance computing (HPC), to run complex simulations that test car performance under a wide variety of driving conditions and racing scenarios. As part of this work, Ferrari will use AWS Graviton2-based instances, which consistently deliver up to 40 per cent better price performance over comparable current-generation x86-based instances.
Further, by tapping into the virtually unlimited scale of AWS HPC resources, Ferrari can run thousands of simulations concurrently to gain insights far faster than ever before possible running simulations in an on-premises environment. As a result, the company’s engineers can pursue an agile approach to experimentation with new designs and strategies to accelerate their pace of innovation.
As Ferrari moves from simulation to assembly of its new road vehicle prototypes, it will apply AWS analytics and Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that helps developers and data scientists build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge) to inform testing and gain deeper insights into how its parts and cars perform under real-world conditions.
To support this work and its simulations, Ferrari will build a data lake with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and use AWS Lake Formation to quickly and securely gather a catalogue and clean hundreds of petabytes of data. Ferrari will examine factors that impact car performance and driver handlings, such as engine temperature at different vehicle speeds, vehicle vibration patterns on different road surfaces, and suspension loads that affect how the vehicle grips the road. Using AWS services to gain a holistic view of car performance, Ferrari can deliver their customers driving experiences that are more thrilling, but also safer and more reliable.
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Ferrari will also leverage AWS to make it easier for current and prospective customers to build, purchase, and maintain their cars. Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS’s fully managed key-value database), Ferrari will be able to quickly create, deploy, and scale improved digital experiences such as the Ferrari Car Configurator. Consumers can use the Configurator to custom-build their car and then immerse themselves in it using high-resolution 2D and 3D visualisations. AWS will also power Ferrari’s Vehicle Information Hub that centralises and manages customers’ car information, providing them with proactive, personalised information related to servicing and maintenance.
In addition, for F1 racing fans, Scuderia Ferrari will use AWS compute, containers, and media services to power a new digital fan engagement platform via its mobile app that will inform, educate, and entertain its fans. Upon creating custom profiles, fans will receive exclusive content such as virtual access to the Scuderia Ferrari garage and hospitality suite on race days. Moving forward, Ferrari plans to build virtual and augmented reality experiences on AWS that bring fans into the garage to interact with drivers and team personnel. Ferrari will also build a virtual fan community among the app’s millions of users and engage fans with app-based quizzes on race days.
