Since 2017, the 3rd Cloud Promotion team, led by Mr. Mitsui, has made the use of AWS managed services a top priority. In developing NTT DOCOMO's services, instead of building the necessary functions from scratch, we combine managed services that eliminate the need for redundancy, backup, monitoring, security measures, patch management, and update support in case of failures on the user side for layers below the OS and middleware managed on the AWS side. As Mr. Mitsui describes it, "the code is full of world-class code," and AWS managed services have been improved and refined through feedback from developers and customers, making the decision a surefire way to develop faster.

If managed services alone do not provide the required functionality and performance, they develop them with capabilities that can run serverless on AWS Lambda or containers on Amazon ECS. AWS Fargate is used as the main execution environment for containers, and Amazon EC2 is used for parts not currently supported by Fargate, such as GPU usage. A cloud-native design is, in principle, at the forefront.

"The migration policy is not to re-host an on-premises environment in AWS, but to refactor it as cloud-native and build it from scratch. Over the past three years, more than 90% of the projects have been implemented in accordance with the policy," said Mr. Mitsui.

In addition, most tasks that can be included in manuals (SOPs), such as restoration, monitoring, and tallying, have been automated to improve operational efficiency. These efforts have now spread throughout the Service Design department.

In addition to building a development structure, Mitsui is also working to raise awareness among engineers so that they can develop using AWS themselves. One of the most important things we focused on was the effect of adding skilled members who all become highly motivated.

"When we brought in outstanding external talent to work on the project, the atmosphere in the department changed dramatically as we saw how they mastered the use of and manipulated managed services to develop a high-quality system in a short period of time. An on-premises engineer who volunteered to join the semi-in-house team also took advantage of AWS to quickly resolve performance issues with the on-premises system with a few younger people. Seeing the appreciation and gratitude they receive from the business community is very inspiring.”

We also work to stimulate communication within the team and raise the level of the entire development group. Case Study Sharing Meetings have been held for projects we have worked on to share our expertise by discussing AWS development methodologies and lessons learned from successes and failures. We also encourage the use of outside programs to learn new technologies and get hands-on experience.

”We challenged ourselves to use the AWS Prototyping Program to build a foundation for rapidly developing and releasing new, small-scale services. Prototyping is supported from the design stage by knowledgeable AWS technical staff to consider and implement the optimal architecture. We were taught the latest development techniques, and the team, which was in a lower class, grew to be on par with the top teams," said Mr. Mitsui.

These efforts have been successful, and the department now receives comments such as "it's worth it," "more people offer opinions and suggestions," "cost consciousness has increased," and "more people smile.” The number of engineers who volunteer to participate in study groups has also increased.

Mr. Mitsui said that AWS was a major factor behind the Service Design Department's actions to transform the organization.

"In the case of large companies with well-established organizations and development methodologies, there are some aspects that are difficult to address in a straightforward manner. There was an atmosphere in the current department that there was no inconvenience in using conventional development methods at the time of my transfer. So we took advantage of AWS to proactively develop services at high speed, and by showing visible results in cost reduction and development efficiency, we deepened the understanding of those around us.”

In the future, Mr. Mitsui intends to standardize this development method throughout the company and make it a de facto practice at NTT DOCOMO, thereby contributing to the promotion of DX. "Recently, our team has been hired for many new small-start projects, and we have been asked by other departments within the company to teach them how to do in-house manufacturing and run fast PDCA cycles. We will continue to take the shortest route as climbers, while demonstrating our achievements to management and expanding horizontally to other departments in the future."

Return to the list of customer case studies in Japan »