Deploying cloud-based engineering workbenches with the Virtual Engineering Workbench on AWS

This article introduces the Virtual Engineering Workbench (VEW), an open source AWS platform enabling self-service cloud-based development environments for automotive and manufacturing teams.

• VEW provides self-service portal for engineers to define, build, and provision pre-configured development environments
• Serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and API Gateway
• Three-stage workflow: packaging components into recipes, publishing as products via Service Catalog, provisioning EC2 instances
• Supports public deployment via CloudFront and private deployment within VPC
• Security includes IAM authorization, JWT validation, AWS WAF, KMS encryption, and Cedar-based fine-grained access
• Deployment via single interactive script takes approximately 60 minutes
• Workbenches provisioned in separate spoke accounts for isolation and cost tracking
• Developers access workbenches via browser using Amazon DCV or SSH
• Open source code available on GitHub under Apache License 2.0

VEW addresses manual provisioning bottlenecks by automating cloud-based engineering environment deployment with reproducible, consistent configurations across teams and projects.