Edmunds Saves $100,000 in Year One by Going Serverless on AWS
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Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Athena
Tech Stack
- Serverless Computing
- Cloud Storage
- Interactive Query Service
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Edmunds is a company that operates a website and mobile apps to help consumers browse automobile dealer inventory, read vehicle reviews, and consume other automobile-related content. The company's mission is to make car buying easy by providing a platform where consumers can complete the key steps in vehicle purchasing: identifying the right vehicle, evaluating trade-ins, analyzing price and financing offers, and finalizing the purchase. Edmunds considers its library of vehicle photos uploaded by auto dealers to be one of its most important assets. The company helps more than 20 million web and mobile users each month and is based in the United States with 700 employees.
The Challenge
Edmunds, a company that helps consumers browse automobile dealer inventory, read vehicle reviews, and consume other automobile-related content, was planning a key update with better image quality and faster load times on the company's website and mobile apps. The company had a library of 50 million vehicle images that needed to be processed into several new aspect ratios and resolutions, resulting in more than half a billion new images. The company's existing image-handling solution, based on Cloudera MapReduce clusters, wasn't suitable for the job as it would have taken too long to develop and would have required the management of new clusters and incurred new monthly costs of at least $10,000.
The Solution
Edmunds decided to use a serverless solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for this project. The serverless solution uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for highly available object storage, with AWS Lambda functions triggered by an AWS API Gateway endpoint. It also includes Amazon Athena, a serverless, interactive service that uses standard SQL to query large data sets by taking advantage of the query-in place functionality of Amazon S3, avoiding the need to move the data to a separate analytics platform. By using Amazon S3 Standard storage, Edmunds achieves 99.999999999 percent data durability and replication across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs), so the company’s data would remain available even in the event of the destruction of an entire AZ’s AWS data centers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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