The ability to innovate faster gives growing companies a competitive advantage. On Amazon Web Services (AWS), TrueCar was able to spin up new development environments in 15 minutes to prototype new ideas, rather than spending countless months on architecting and testing in data centers. See how we helped TrueCar enable rapid prototyping though a DevOps culture by leveraging the AWS platform.
Video Transcription
Tommy McClung, CTO: TrueCar is an online digital automotive marketplace. Our mission is to create a transparent car-buying process. The company has 600+ employees and we power the car buying service of 700 partners across the country. All of this is powered by AWS. The biggest, most impressive thing about AWS is the breadth of their offerings. Whenever I have a problem, AWS has a technology solution that can solve it. It’s no longer a question of how are we going to do this, it’s more like how are we going to leverage AWS to pull it off.
David Giffin, VP, Technology: Before moving to AWS, our IT environment was based on off-premises and on-premises data centers and what we’re doing right now is migrating all of that into the cloud.
Tommy McClung, CTO: First, step was to get our team focused on the problem at hand, which is delivering great products to our customers. Second, it was to get everybody working on a unified platform which includes a consistent and common set of technologies, across our applications and infrastructure.
David Giffin, VP, Technology: As we chose AWS as our cloud provider, knowing that there were Premier Consulting Partners that would help support us in the migration was huge. CorpInfo-Onica has really been key to meeting all of our objectives in AWS by helping us with the migration strategy and being there during all of our project planning and implementation.
Tommy McClung, CTO: We embedded CorpInfo-Onica into our DevOps team. They helped us build out a DevOps culture that enabled our developers to not have to worry as much about it; they just built their application and then rolled those into a Docker container and off we were to the races. Pre-AWS we were using many different technologies and languages which created a lot of friction for the team, constraints on resources, and a lot of people waiting around. Our ability to leverage AWS and enable each developer to have their own instance of TrueCar without worrying about stomping on each other’s toes was a huge motivator for making the move.
David Giffin, VP, Technology: Everybody at TrueCar actually gets their own development environment and we’ve quickly and rapidly spun that up by leveraging the technology we’ve built internally called SpacePods. Any developer can, with the push of a button, create their own version of TrueCar.
Tommy McClung, CTO: When we looked at what we currently run in the data center and how would we implement it on AWS, there was an answer for all of it. There is Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) for Hadoop, there’s Amazon Elastic Search for our elastic search infrastructure, we’ve got elastic load balancer, we’ve got ECS, we have Kinesis that we’re doing all of our log streaming with, and then also we realized it was a way for us to enable rapid prototyping. We have a product where in order to understand what your vehicle is; we need to type in a VIN number. If you know where it is on your car, it’s a 16-digit alphanumeric code, and it’s pretty difficult to type out. So we thought it’d be better if you could just snap a photo. In order to analyze and extract the data needed from the photo in our data center, it would have taken us six months of time to go buy a hardware just to tinker around with a GPU cluster to do optical image recognition. We did it in about 15 minutes on AWS by spinning up our own GPU cluster and testing out a number of libraries that will pull this off for us. So on AWS, in minutes, we can do things that would have taken us months to even just see if the prototype would work.
Our experience working with AWS has been amazing. We have all the technologies that we need in order to run our applications and run our business. The morale of the team who are building products has exponentially increased, so across the board, it’ been a phenomenal experience.
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Our team has vast experience in automation in AWS (CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, and OpsWorks), Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, and Ansible. Contact us today to learn how we can help on your next DevOps project.
