Cloud Native Data Engineering in Automotive: Impact and Trends for 2025

Here, you’ll learn how cars were built in the past and the current role of cloud-native data engineering solutions in the automotive industry—plus, future cloud-enabled industry trends.

Take the road toward innovative cloud-native development with NaNLABS. Augment your software engineering team with experts in automotive solutions and develop fast and high-quality solutions.

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Table of contents

• Put the car in reverse: The early days of vehicle manufacturing

• Parking mode: Today’s state of the automotive industry and its relation to cloud-native data engineering

• Let’s drive: Common car features that are cloud-enabled 

• Activate 4WD: Future automotive trends powered by cloud-native data engineering solutions

• Take the fast track to cloud-native data engineering solutions with NaNLABS 

Put the car in reverse: The early days of vehicle manufacturing

Karl Benz patented the Motorwagen in 1886. It’s considered the first car as it used an internal combustion engine.

It’s almost unbelievable that we went from a gas-powered tricycle to self-driving cars in just two hundred years.

The first car was purely mechanical, powered by a gas engine—its only feature. While cars evolved with time, even back in the 1910s, they lacked advanced features. Vehicles only needed to be safe, durable, and reliable.

Henry Ford pioneered in that area, making cars affordable and with the features mentioned above with the Model T. “The Model T was designed to be easy to drive and to repair. Light materials and Ford’s innovative production methods kept its price relatively low,” shares ETL solutions.

While Ford didn’t invent cars, the Model T is considered the beginning of modern car production as it introduced several still current practices:

• Debuting assembly lines for mass production

• Building interchangeable parts

• Using separate cylinders for the head and block

In the early days, everything was mechanical, and factory workers followed paper-based instructions, making the process tiring and prone to errors.

Software also found its way into the car manufacturing process around the 1960s but mostly relied on on-premise systems. This limited flexibility in design, production, and customer service as car users needed to bring in the vehicle for diagnostics or improvements. Carmakers also had to invest heavily in infrastructure to support these systems.

Parking mode: Today’s state of the automotive industry and its relation to cloud-native data engineering

Cars are now almost completely computerized with a key focus on autonomous driving, electric fuels, and car connectivity.

Vehicles still need hardware and mechanics for suspension and safety breaks. However, car manufacturers are moving towards treating vehicles as software on wheels by leveraging cloud-native solutions.

Adopting cloud-native solutions in automotive means that the car’s software can live on the cloud instead of on-premise, making it more cost-efficient and secure. 

Since cloud-based development is the present and future of the automotive industry, big manufacturers are restructuring their organizations, hiring in-house cloud-native experts—and developing custom enterprise software solutions. “Carmakers are appointing chief software officers, presenting strategy at “software days” and setting up software divisions,” shares The Economist. 

Companies like Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and GM are buying office space to hire software developers, “But only Volvo and Ferrari have CEOs with a background in tech,” the article says.

The industry is making an aggressive move toward adopting cloud-native software solutions. But, how are carmakers already using this technology to improve their users’ experience?

Examples of how cloud-native data engineering improves the automotive industry

Carmakers are already leveraging private and public cloud solutions. Here are five examples of how the automotive industry is already using cloud-native data engineering:

1. Using data for predictive analysis

One of the biggest advantages of cloud-native solutions is being able to collect, process, and store data—and use it to make predictive analysis. When it comes to the automotive industry, there are many ways in which this could happen. 

For example, in 2017, Mercedes-Benz launched DrivePilot as its automated driving software. This system captures continuous data to anticipate future events and ensure vehicle safety through monitoring road conditions and the feedback-user functionality—which ensures users are alert and ready to take control if needed, discouraging behaviors like sleeping.

2. Launching over-the-air (OTA) updates

Just like with any app, you can add patches, fix bugs, or make improvements and guarantee cars run on the most updated software version. “Features that are delivered to the user on demand require two things: Insights to understand what type of features should be offered to a user so that they can order them, and a safe and secure way of downloading the feature onto the device. This is eased if the software architecture is cloud-native,” says Poorab Sarmah, Vice President & Managing Director at Aptiv.

This will become more popular in the future, as according to UBS, by 2030 four in five cars will be internet-enabled and support OTA updates to its system. Car manufacturers will be able to update the vehicle’s firmware and software remotely.

3. Collaborating remotely in design and development

Since everything happens on the cloud, developers and software engineers can work on the car’s system from anywhere. “The tools provided to the software engineers and all the actors of the development are operating in an environment that is not your desktop,” explains Michael Chabroux, Vice President of Product Management at Wind River. 

You don’t need to have people working in the same location. Instead, you can hire the best software engineers around the globe and enable remote collaboration in Agile development teams. 

4. Offering better scalability

Cloud-native solutions let you build scalable infrastructures, meaning you can get more compute power when needed, or reduce it if you need to shrink the operation. For example, AWS automotive solutions come with auto-scaling tools like EC2. 

You can also leverage cloud-native data engineering to collect and store vehicle data, run tests and simulations, or (as mentioned) deliver OTA updates. Plus, the flexibility that comes with buying more computing power as needed, simplifies innovation and scalability without major financial risk.

5. Leveraging pay-as-you-go models

Following the previous point, one of the things that makes cloud-native solutions scalable is that you can pay as you go. Meaning, you only get charged for what you use, instead of having to purchase big infrastructure to handle on-premise systems.  

Let’s drive: Common car features that are cloud-enabled

You’ve seen how cloud-native data engineering is already improving development in the automotive industry. Here are tangible use cases or features you can find in modern vehicles that are powered by cloud-native solutions:

AI and self-driving cars

Autonomous vehicles (AV) are still quite new, but these are expected to become more and more common thanks to AI technology. Self-driving cars exist, in part, due to cloud-native technology. It provides software teams with the right computational resources and data processing needs to develop, train, and deploy the machine learning (ML) models that support AV.

Automated vehicle cybersecurity

Building cloud-based vehicles inevitably poses cybersecurity risks. However, thanks to data engineering for cybersecurity, you can develop powerful ML solutions to protect cars from potential threats, such as advanced systems to detect cyber attacks. 

Autonomous mobility-as-a-service (AMaaS)

Thanks to cloud-native solutions, people can hop on self-driving cars after requesting the service through a ride-sharing app. This interconnectivity allows users to make a request through their phones and have an AV take them to their destination without further instructions.

Connected vehicles and vehicle-to-everything (V2X)

Modern cars are connected to the internet and support OTA updates, remote malfunctioning diagnostics, and real-time road information thanks to the cloud. Also, cloud-developed vehicles allow for intercommunication between cars and other electronics, such as smartphones. This way, drivers can listen to music, learn about traffic and routes, and prevent accidents.

Generative AI for vehicle design and manufacturing

Generative AI tools can help car manufacturers get design ideas and suggestions that will simplify or lower the costs of manufacturing. Keep in mind that these tools will only get better, so design and development teams will rely on these to get ideas and improve the team’s velocity.  

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS)

ADAS tends to use sensors and cameras to identify close-by obstacles, potential risks for the, or road errors, and send an accurate response. These systems make the driving experience safer. 

The ability to collect this data in real-time and trigger system responses is only possible due to cloud-native solutions.

On-demand 3D printing

Car manufacturers can request custom 3D pieces to replace certain car parts or accessories. This is available thanks to cloud-integrated 3D printing systems that allow manufacturers to scan and replicate any piece.

Connected electric car charging networks

Cloud-based systems use real-time data processing and analytics to manage car energy consumption, optimize charging schedules, and notify users of nearby charging stations and their availability.

At NaNLABS, we recently worked with an EV charging solutions company for fleet operators with medium to heavy-duty transports. During the collaboration, we: 

• Developed a cloud-based charge management system (CMS) to enable fleet managers to schedule EV charger use. 

• Created a reservation system extending the CMS, allowing fleet managers to plan charge sessions within the company’s shared charging sites.

• Built a data lake for the client and developed data pipelines for real-time, near real-time (from 15 minutes to 1 hour), and batch analytics (1-2 days).

• Conducted load tests using electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) simulators to evaluate software performance under various scenarios.

Thanks to these interventions, the client enabled real-time and near real-time data ingestion, cleaning, and analysis from IoT devices—which stream data 24/7. It also allowed the team to get alerts in case of anomalies such as getting no data from chargers or having insufficient charging power, so they could fix it immediately. 

This data availability allowed the client to power other applications and services, optimizing operational efficiency and decision-making for fleet managers.

Need to optimize your EV business’s data engineering? Make some room in the co-pilot’s seat for the NaNLABS team.

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Robotics and automated manufacturing

Remember how in the past assembly lines were manual and people were responsible for attaching pieces? Thanks to robotics (enabled by cloud solutions), assembly lines are now almost completely automated. This means car manufacturing is much more efficient and precise.     

Activate 4WD: Future automotive trends powered by cloud-native data engineering solutions

Thanks to the cloud’s flexibility, you can innovate with future development as much as you want. This means better connectivity and interconnectivity, faster updates, and further remote collaboration. 

As shared in The Economist article cited above, Gill Pratt, Chief Scientist at Toyota, thinks car software should be a seamless part of the smartphone ecosystem. Aligned with this statement, one of the upcoming trends of cloud-enabled solutions in automotive includes the use of virtual personal assistants. Think of Alexa, Siri, or Ok Google but in vehicles. 

Another thing to expect in the future is better and more efficient AV solutions packed with a powerful ADAS. “The cloud will offer the integrated platform and storage required for future autonomous vehicle (AV) and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) architecture development and simulation,” writes Gartner in the Emerging Tech: The Future of Cloud Computing in Automotive report. 

Generative AI is also a big part of the automotive industry’s future, more specifically in terms of design, iterations, and feature development. 

In terms of cloud-native trends that will likely impact the automotive industry, you’ll see more of serverless computing, edge computing, quantum computing, and an increased need for DevOps.

Take the fast track to cloud-native data engineering solutions with NaNLABS 

While most carmakers are actively investing in building in-house software teams, it’s not necessarily your area of expertise. So, focusing on building the right tenure internally can lead you to miss out on potential developments. 

To stay ahead of your competitors, you’ll need to team up with the best technical partners to make your ideas come to life fast and with high quality. One way to achieve this is by augmenting your team with expert software engineers. 

At NaNLABS, we have experience in designing very high-quality scalable, unified data ecosystems that integrate both structured and unstructured data in real-time—e.g., vehicle telemetry and sensor data.

By using Databricks and AWS Redshift, we enable automotive companies to handle high-throughput data streams while maintaining performance and scalability. This is crucial for electric vehicle (EV) companies, as they need to manage and analyze large, diverse datasets efficiently to:

• Monitor vehicle and charging station performance in real-time

• Perform predictive maintenance using cloud-native AI models

• Ensure seamless data processing and access for making fast, data-driven decisions

Our focus is on your business outcomes and cost optimization to ensure that solutions are both technically advanced and financially sustainable. This gives you the agility to stay ahead in a competitive market.

Take the road toward innovative cloud-native development with NaNLABS. Augment your software engineering team with experts in automotive solutions and develop fast and high-quality solutions.

Get in touch