ASML: Creating the ideal environment for world-class engineers
About ASML
ASML is the world’s leading producer of photolithography machines, which are essential to the manufacture of microchips. It’s groundbreaking technology is at the forefront of the drive towards smaller, faster, more efficient computing.
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At the cutting-edge of the microchip industry, ASML gives its engineers the ideal tools to test innovations and perfect software, using a serverless solution built with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Delivers test results in under one hour, instead of two hours to a day
- Operates a serverless solution without the need to run or maintain a cluster
- Drives a culture of rapid testing, to encourage innovation and root out issues
Achieves 80% reduction in time taken to test code
Every microchip in the world is manufactured using a photolithography machine, from the chips inside your mobile phone to the servers behind Google Cloud. Photolithography machines are what make the mass production of microelectronics possible, using frequencies of light to print miniature designs onto delicate silicon wafers. The ongoing advances in photolithography lead the drive towards ever-smaller microchips, and ever-greater possibilities in electronics.
ASML is the world’s largest and most advanced supplier of these essential systems. Based in the small town of Veldhoven, in the Netherlands, the company controls more than 60% of the global market for photolithography machines and is the only producer of the most-accurate EUV (extreme ultraviolet) systems, which enable the creation of next-generation, hyper-miniaturized chips. Operating at a nanoscopic level, each EUV machine is the size of a double-decker bus, weighs 180 tons, and sells for more than €100 million.
Because ASML machines play such a vital role, they are rigorously tested before they are sent out. Holding up a microchip production line can cost a five-figure dollar sum for every hour of delay. More serious still, a microscopic printing fault can be very difficult to detect, and can compromise thousands of chips before it is discovered. ASML receives no telemetry data from its products after they are shipped, in order to respect the confidentiality of its customers’ intellectual property, so ASML software needs to be ready to meet any challenge.
"Every time we change a single line of code, we test everything to be sure that there are no unintended consequences," says Andre de Brito Passos, Software Engineer at ASML. "We have 3,000 engineers constantly creating new software and new features for our customers, working on some of the most challenging problems in the industry. One of our jobs is to make it easy for the software community to run tests, so that we don’t hold them back."
ASML provides engineers with virtual machines for testing, run from an on-premises data center, but these may take a full day to return results. Andre and his team looked for a way to deliver results in less than an hour to give ASML engineers the tools they need to perfect their machines.
"ASML quality comes directly from the 3,000 software engineers who write code for our machines," says Andre. "They operate at the top of their game, at the cutting-edge of technology. It’s our job to give them what they need to develop, run tests, and push back the boundaries of what’s possible, and Google Cloud helps us deliver that."
"ASML quality comes directly from the 3,000 software engineers who write code for our machines. They operate at the top of their game, at the cutting-edge of technology. It’s our job to give them what they need to develop, run tests, and push back the boundaries of what’s possible."
—Andre de Brito Passos, Software Engineer, ASMLAccelerating the development cycle
Create, test, learn: the faster a developer can receive useful feedback on proposed changes, the more effectively they can innovate. At ASML, software engineers had to wait anywhere from two hours to a full day for test results, as they queued up for limited on-premises data center capacity. Andre and his team identified faster test results as an essential foundation for a new development culture, based on rapid, incremental changes deployed through continuous integration.
"If developers know they have to wait for a day to get results, they’re likely to run fewer tests," says Andre. "That feeds into a dynamic where, consciously or not, developers begin to limit experimentation, because they test one version of an idea, instead of two or three different versions. Everything needs to be rigorously tested, at every stage, and fast test results give developers an incentive to act immediately, so that if something goes wrong, they just fix it, rather than adding it to a list."
Demand for testing varies dramatically, depending on how many tests engineers look to run, and the scale of those tests. That makes cloud infrastructure a natural fit, ready to scale at speed to match demand without the need to provision excess infrastructure and pay for maintenance. ASML compared leading cloud providers.
"Google Cloud uses the same open-source software that we use on our on-premises servers,” says Andre. "We use Red Hat as a virtual operating system and QEMU as a virtualization engine to run VMs, so everything we did on-premises, ran immediately on Google Cloud. No proprietary solutions; we simply spin up a VM and put our application on top. Minimal effort, because the technology stack was exactly the same."
Cloud consultancy Rackspace supported the migration, helping to draft a microservices architecture orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine. "Rackspace brought us up to speed," says Andre. "It was a really good collaboration. We were a small team of five developers, only one of whom had cloud experience, and they put us in a position to follow our own path."
That’s when the ASML team decided to take things one step further, using Google Cloud products to create an ultra-lean, serverless architecture. Not only would this eliminate the need to maintain a Kubernetes cluster, it would also help keep ASML within project usage quotas on Google Cloud, which were being met in moments of exceptional traffic.
"We reached out to Google Cloud, and with Google Cloud Consulting Services, we went from one project running a Kubernetes cluster to multiple projects running in a serverless model in just six weeks," says Andre. "It would have taken us a lot longer to do that by ourselves. The collaboration was excellent."
"It costs the same to run one VM for an hour, or six VMs for ten minutes. By deploying tests intelligently with Google Cloud Functions, we can run processes in parallel, so that instead of waiting one day, our colleagues can have results ready in less than an hour."
—Andre de Brito Passos, Software Engineer, ASMLA super-efficient, serverless system
ASML uses Google Cloud Functions and Google Cloud Build to deliver test VMs for its engineers without the need for dedicated infrastructure. "When we need infrastructure, we just send a request, and Google Cloud delivers," says Andre. "When the test is done, everything shuts down, so we only pay for what we use."
ASML developers use a command line developed in-house to queue a test request and send its payload to a Google Cloud Storage bucket. That bucket triggers a Google Cloud Pub/Sub message associated with a Google Cloud Function, which then evaluates the needs of the request and calls a Cloud Firestore database to specify the VMs required. A Cloud Function then calls a Cloud Build, which creates that infrastructure with the Google Compute Engine API and begins to run tests with content from the bucket. Finished tests are reported either with Google Cloud Pub/Sub, or through periodic checks by Google Cloud Functions.
"It costs the same to run one VM for an hour, or six VMs for ten minutes," says Andre. "By deploying tests intelligently with Google Cloud Functions, we can run processes in parallel, so that instead of waiting one day, our colleagues can have results ready in less than an hour. The Rackspace Technology team worked really well together with ASML bringing experience and expertise on services and best practices regarding Google Cloud products. After our initial successes we decided to move to a serverless architecture."
"The biggest impact from this project is in the reactions of our developers. We’re seeing a cultural change towards making immediate repairs which directly improves their work satisfaction. In this case, there really isn’t a trade-off between speed and quality; speed and quality go hand-in-glove."
—Andre de Brito Passos, Software Engineer, ASMLReliable testing results in under an hour
The new solution reduces the time taken to test code by around 80%. As well as parallelizing workloads to deliver results in one hour, the immediate availability of cloud eliminates queueing, making the process more predictable.
ASML currently runs 16,000 VMs per hour for testing, and the team expects that figure to triple as the solution is more widely adopted. More than 300 engineers already use the solution, and certain tests, such as the full qualification of the code, which currently runs daily, will soon run every time a line of code is changed.
"The biggest impact from this project is in the reactions of our developers," says Andre. "We’re seeing a cultural change towards making immediate repairs which directly improves their work satisfaction. With Google Cloud, we’ve seen that there really isn’t a trade-off between speed and quality; speed and quality go hand-in-glove."
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About ASML
ASML is the world’s leading producer of photolithography machines, which are essential to the manufacture of microchips. It’s groundbreaking technology is at the forefront of the drive towards smaller, faster, more efficient computing.
About Rackspace
Rackspace provides multicloud consultancy services and solutions for customers in more than 120 countries.