Digital Auto Auction Platform

Posted by Encora on Jul 6, 2023 3:29:52 PM
Encora’s approach drove significant improvements across the client’s eCommerce KPI dashboard.

Topics: Cloud Services, AWS, Retail & CPG, Automotive

Industry Context

Auto auctions have played a significant role in the automotive industry, providing a marketplace for buying and selling vehicles. The client, an American company established in 2007, recognized the potential for innovation in this space. By leveraging its brick-and-mortar auto auction industry expertise, our client set out to revolutionize auto auctions. An online-only auction website seamlessly connects buyers and sellers, disrupting the traditional auction model and empowering buyers and sellers to participate in auctions from anywhere at any time. Encora’s expertise in AWS helped the client migrate to the cloud.

PS Industry

Client Challenge

The client encountered significant infrastructure challenges, primarily due to the high cost of an overprovisioned server. The app suffered downtime every 15 days. Instead of preventing crashes and enhancing auction performance, the on-prem approach proved financially burdensome. Moreover, high availability and smooth performance are critical for time-limited auctions. A single on-premises server meant a single point of failure and several difficulties when diagnosing issues. On-premises resource provisioning and hosting application parts on a single server also made scaling and business expansion difficult. 
PS Challenge

Approach

  • Cloud Services - Migration of on-prem infrastructure to AWS cloud
  • Platform Modernization, through the refactor of legacy architecture to a modern solution using AWS services

PS Approach

Why AWS?

  • AWS is the most popular cloud platform with significantly more managed features in comparison to other options​
  • AWS provides infrastructure-related services such as computing, storage, networking and security.​
  • AWS delivers top-tier provisions for high availability, automated scalability, enhanced security, serverless architecture and services, and high-level data storage, among others
AWS Solution 02

AWS Solution

By refactoring the legacy architecture to a modern solution, Encora enabled the client to migrate its on-prem infrastructure to the AWS cloud. 

  • Refactored parts of the app for the cloud and used AWS-managed alternatives for high availability and performance 
  • Supported multiple availability zones for databases, backend, and frontend 
  • Used AWS services to scale horizontally before each auction 
  • Provided a cost-optimized system and infrastructure capable of managing the rapid rise in customers at auction start 
  • Leveraged the observability and continuous deployment services provided by AWS 

Primary AWS Services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Relational Database Service (RDS), VPC, ElastiCache, Route 53, CodeDeploy, S3, CloudWatch, Simple Notification Service (SNS), Simple Email Service (SES).

AWS Solution 1111

Results

  • Provides 99.99% uptime through multi-AZ for RDS with autoscaling groups
  • Increases security at the networking and infrastructure level
  • Enhances availability and performance on all application levels by reducing infrastructure costs by 30%
  • Offers high availability and disaster recovery measures (like multiple availability zones for databases and backend environments, automatic scaling, and others)
  • Improves observability across the application and infrastructure through monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch
  • Provides continuous deployment automation using AWS CodeDeploy

 

PS  Results
Metric Infraestrucutre Costs -30%

Infrastructure Costs