Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it has entered into an agreement with Ferrari to become the car maker’s official cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence provider. Together, the companies hope to accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire Ferrari organization, including the road cars department, GT Competitions, the Ferrari Challenge and the Formula 1 team.
Ferrari will use AWS’s breadth and depth of services and global infrastructure, including the AWS Europe (Milan) region, to streamline the design and testing of its cars while also leveraging AWS to launch a digital fan engagement platform via its mobile app.
“Ferrari and AWS both represent excellence in their fields. As our official cloud provider, I firmly believe AWS will enable our company to become a data-driven organization that uses the power of technology to improve our products, increase engagement with Ferrari enthusiasts worldwide and deliver continuously more exciting driving experiences,” said Mattia Binotto, team principal of Scuderia Ferrari. “We chose AWS because of their relentless focus on innovation, unmatched portfolio of capabilities and proven experience supporting partners in the automotive and sports industries. Throughout our storied history, Ferrari has had racing and innovation at our core, and now we look forward to applying AWS machine learning, advanced analytics and high-performance computing across the company to deliver deeper insights and even more powerful cars.”
Ferrari will utilize Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – with a range of specialized instance types for efficient high-performance computing (HPC) – to run complex simulations. It will also use AWS Graviton2-based instances, which are claimed to consistently deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current-generation x86-based instances. Furthermore, by tapping into the virtually unlimited scale of AWS HPC resources, Ferrari can run thousands of simulations concurrently to gain insights far more quickly than was ever 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 says it will build a data lake with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and use AWS Lake Formation to quickly and securely gather, catalog and clean hundreds of petabytes of data. This will allow it to scrape data to find patterns that might affect car performance.