An Engine of Efficiency: BMW Group’s CI/CD Modernization Journey with AWS

This article details BMW Group's CI/CD infrastructure modernization journey from on-premises to AWS, scaling from hundreds to 130,000+ daily builds.

• Migrated Jenkins-based CI/CD from on-premises OpenShift to AWS cloud in 2020
• Adopted GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners on EC2 for improved elasticity
• Implemented serverless architecture using Lambda, API Gateway, and SQS for webhook processing
• Reduced costs by 63% and increased parallel capacity by 50% with ephemeral runners
• Introduced pre-warmed EC2 pools, reducing runner provisioning from 2.5 minutes to 18 seconds
• Expanded to ARM-based Graviton instances for superior cost-performance ratios
• Added macOS virtualization using Tart on EC2 Mac instances for iOS builds
• Implemented JFrog Artifactory to cache dependencies and reduce rate-limiting issues
• Migrated Lambda functions to containers on Amazon EKS for consistency across regions
• Platform now supports 1,300+ microservices across hundreds of AWS accounts globally

BMW's iterative approach demonstrates how continuous architectural evolution, team empowerment, and comprehensive observability enable scaling CI/CD infrastructure to support massive development velocity while reducing costs and build times.