How Continental uses GitHub
Continental, a global automotive supplier with more than 244,000 employees in 60 countries, has been pioneering mobility solutions since 1871. Today, the company's innovations in automated driving, connectivity, tires, and electrification are deeply tied to software—modern vehicles now use over 100 million lines of code, a number that continues to rise.
The Challenge of Digital Transformation
"The automotive industry is going through the biggest transformation in its 130 year history," said Software Architect Timm Drevensek. "Agility and collaboration across continents and projects are becoming ever more important requirements in our R&D."
Historically, developers for infotainment and instrumentation operated in separate silos. As safety-relevant instrumentation became integrated with open infotainment systems on the Integrated Interior Platform (IIP), the complexity of solutions increased dramatically. Continental needed to evolve toward agile collaboration to manage this new reality.
Migration to Git and GitHub
Traditionally, Continental used a proprietary version control solution. Migration to Git increased development performance and enabled continuous integration, but the initial open source solution lacked the system stability required for scaled teams. Within six months of switching to a Git system, developers were working faster and more effectively with less support.
"In two weeks, we switched our projects to Git," Drevensek said. "Team leads saw that we could integrate all of our existing tools and release two to three times per day—up from two to three times per week. The speed and performance of the team increased dramatically."
Introducing GitHub in the DevOps portfolio accelerated this transformation. GitHub's API, search functionalities, and code review system proved especially valuable for teams around the world who wanted to innersource, reuse code, and break down silos.
Building a Comprehensive DevOps Ecosystem
To meet strict automotive safety standards, Continental created an automated pipeline integrating tools like Jira and Grafana to verify all software changes with pull requests and maintain detailed records. The company uses third-party integrations to build a secure and comprehensive DevOps ecosystem, including:
- Prometheus for monitoring
- Elasticsearch for logging data
- Jira for issue-tracking
- Confluence for documentation
- Artifactory for binary storage
- Kubernetes for build infrastructure
- Jenkins for continuous integration
"To make a change across systems, any developer can open a pull request," Drevensek said. "Jenkins ensures that every pull request is verified and meets our standards. This gives developers more freedom and autonomy and makes their lives easier. They don't have to call someone asking to integrate the code. We have established a traceable integration system that is fully automated and easy to use."
Enabling Innersource and Developer Collaboration
GitHub's introduction coincided with Continental's innersource initiatives, allowing the company to synchronize internal development with open source activities hosted on Continental's GitHub organization.
"Developers can create a project by themselves," said Innersource Project Manager Zsuzsanna Gnandt. "If they have a project they want to build and take part in, they can bring it to Continental's innersource world."
This approach enables developers to borrow best practices from open source communities and contribute across the organization. "With innersource, we want to enable all developers with the freedom to be creative, to drive innovation without barriers, and to be appreciated for their contributions across the company," Gnandt said.
Accelerating Onboarding and Global Collaboration
Without a DevOps setup, onboarding a new developer took two weeks of manual work. Using tools like Ansible and Vagrant with a GitOps philosophy and GitHub as central configuration storage reduced that timeframe to just 10 minutes—even for a distributed workforce.
"It brings us closer to people from the other side of the world," Drevensek said. "You can contact someone you've never seen before who's found and used your project. Sometimes they even create a pull request to improve and add onto the work you've already done."
Support and Future Direction
Continental developers receive ongoing support from GitHub Support, which Drevensek values highly. "You don't feel that your request is stuck in an email inbox," he said. "There's somebody who understands on the other side. You don't have to get passed to three different people to get the right answer."
One of Continental's key company goals is "to generate growth for system solutions with our pioneering software." GitHub, paired with state-of-the-art tooling, is essential to providing the environment needed to reach this goal. For Drevensek, embracing change is fundamental to improving Continental's products. "Change might be challenging sometimes, but being a part of that change and shaping it is exciting."