Online car retailer Cazoo is not hitting the brakes as it is building its entire IT infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
London-headquartered Cazoo turned to AWS and UK-based software provider and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Codurance for the move.
According to AWS, Cazoo adopted serverless architecture to support its compute and data analytics needs. This enabled the company to build and launch an end-to-end e-commerce platform in 90 days.
Bob Gregory, Engineering Coach at Cazoo, explains: “Building modern application delivery capabilities in-house takes years, but with AWS Lambda, we had those capabilities from day one. We are now all-in with AWS, and we look forward to doing more with AWS to scale and compete across the UK and Europe in the year ahead.”
Darren Hardman, VP and General Manager, UK and Ireland at AWS, adds: “In just three years, Cazoo has gone from an idea to selling over 60,000 cars to customers to date by building the Cazoo platform using AWS’s secure, reliable, and scalable cloud services.”
Cazoo says it is now using AWS to expand its business into Europe. The company recently launched in France and Germany, without needing to change its underlying architecture, and plans to launch in Italy and Spain this year.
Today Cazoo is using more than 50 AWS services including AWS Lambda for serverless compute, Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL database services, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage, AWS Glue for data integration, and Amazon Athena for interactive queries and data analytics.
More is on the way. For example, Cazoo plans to use machine learning services including Amazon Rekognition, to add image and video analysis to applications, and to process car registration plate numbers; and Amazon Textract, which automatically extracts text, handwriting and data from scanned documents.
The car retailer also intends to use Amazon Location Service, to add location functionality to applications, and support the company’s logistics and route planning systems.
Late last year, eWeek UK was at the annual AWS re:Invent conference and looked at its products, updates and contemplated what age of cloud we are in. The company used its first post-lockdown ‘in real life’ event to table somewhere over 50 product announcements.
