ENT339: Mapmaking and Location-Based Systems in the Cloud

From 2014 through 2017, TomTom successfully migrated its major business systems to the AWS Cloud. This migration helped TomTom's vision of real-time mapmaking become a reality, and it put TomTom significantly ahead of the competition in the domain of location technology. In this session, we explore the practical aspects of migrating to the cloud, including technological challenges as well as the necessary shifts in mindset to successfully get us through the migration journey. We discuss how the migration was done gradually due to huge risk exposure all the while maintaining 24/7 system uptime. We explore how the expected benefits of the cloud came to life, and we elaborate on the unexpected benefits, such as cost of ownership and increased awareness in the teams, as well as upper-stack benefits and the possibility to fit services and hardware while scaling the system—benefits that we could not have realized with on-premises infrastructure.