Cazoo is not a simple e-commerce site - it is a complex business with many value streams including customer services, customer engagement, logistics, finance, operations plus search and browse.
The team at Cazoo wanted to build an offering that they could take to the market quickly and they wanted to build with quality baked in from the start to ensure future scalability as demand grows. However, in the competitive and fast-paced world of used cars, how do you create a delightful user experience and simultaneously build stable systems for every step of the user journey within a matter of months?
Cazoo knew that in order to build a well architected platform that would support the spikes in demand for its services, would easily scale and would provide an experience that exceeds its customer’s expectations, it was vital to compile an exceptional technology team that had a pedigree in the industry and would have a culture of engineering excellence at its core.
This is where Codurance came in. We joined the Cazoo team early and quickly grew to support the software development effort to deliver solutions from the ground-up across the entire value stream, from logistics and delivery to the customer-facing website and integration with 3rd-party finance, warranty and insurance providers.
The implementation was based on a vision of Serverless architecture, making extensive use of AWS, including AWS Lambda, S3, CloudFront and CloudFormation. These and other AWS services were used in conjunction with 3rd party headless CMS and e-commerce platforms to create a highly scalable, resilient and flexible system whilst minimising total cost of ownership.
"If we go serverless we want to use the lowest risk, most mature and safest bet for a platform that will be the strongest solution over the next 3-5 years - and that is currently AWS"
Bob Gregory, Chief Architect, Cazoo
Alongside application development, Codurance also provided modern platform engineering expertise and supported the Cazoo team to instill a strong engineering culture with a DevOps mindset. A comprehensive operational monitoring system was implemented, ensuring not only operational effectiveness but also the ability to gather fast feedback, so vital to successful projects.
Our services included software delivery and integration, specialist expertise, infrastructure setup and configuration, coaching and mentoring, setting up Community of Practices plus knowledge transfer around team and software development best practices.
To read the full case study detailing the journey undertaken, please follow this link
