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Customer Story

AIXBRO Speeds up Searches With AWS Serverless

The leading Swiss automotive parts distributor used a Proof of Concept to discover how the cloud could secure its future growth
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Related services
Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Industry
Transport | Trade | Logistics

Company
Xebia

AIXBRO GmbH is a company that specializes in the distribution of car parts and accessories across Switzerland, including via an online store, Auto Equipment CH. Based in St. Gallen, the company allows customers to source and order from a wide range of original and aftermarket parts, whether it’s from their smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. AIXBRO can source from up to thirty million parts at any one time, always ensuring the provided part is 100% suitable for the identified vehicle. The company operates with both B2B and B2C clients and aims to provide all customers with the lowest available spare parts prices in Switzerland.
Why
Existing infrastructure was unable to handle product loads, which reduced search and update speeds
What
A PoC demonstrated AWS cloud’s impact on the company's data infrastructure
How
Customer searches now take seconds and the cloud architecture is ready for future growth

A Proof of Concept Showcasing the Cloud

AIXBRO sources and orders a wide range of car parts and accessories for its clients, with an eCommerce system containing up to thirty million products at any one time. Therefore, high-quality data management is essential.

The company’s existing infrastructure was limited, only able to populate around half a million products, and taking up to eighty hours to do so. AIXBRO wanted faster query times with minimal latency, as well as flexibility and scalability for future growth, and was curious how the cloud could improve performance. The company enlisted Xebia to help create a cloud-native Proof of Concept (PoC) to showcase how effective the technology would be.

Integrating Amazon & Elasticsearch Services

The companies decided to base the solution within AWS Managed Services to help AIXBRO adopt AWS at scale, with Elasticsearch working as the data store, accessed via the Amazon API Gateway. This would allow the system to handle much larger queries and easily provide results while ensuring that the system could handle data volumes far above the half a million entries the previous solution handled.

AIXBRO combined AWS Lambda with Python to ensure a fast and cost-efficient load process, thanks to Lambda’s serverless nature. Combined with Elasticsearch in the Cloud, this meant that the time it took to load half a million items went from eighty hours down to just five minutes, and it could load the full thirty million listings in just a few hours rather than days, allowing for more regular, efficient and consistent updates.

“As well as modernizing our extensive inventory management, Xebia demonstrated a cloud solution that is future-proof, frustration-free, and the basis for features that will transform our company even further as we grow.”
AIXBRO
Stefan Hilbrich e-Commerce Director, AIXBRO

Cloud Brings Speed and Savings

The final PoC demonstrated that the cloud provided AIXBRO’s customers with a much-improved service when searching and purchasing online. Searches now take just seconds, which along with the new API allows clients to easily browse AXIBRO’s stock. The entire database is now updated and deployed within minutes, ensuring stock information is reliable. 

Thanks to its scalable performance, the PoC fits within Amazon’s free tier, helping save AIXBRO significant costs, as does using AWS Managed Services. The scalability of the serverless solution means that when the company’s inventory grows the system seamlessly does so too.

As a result, AIXBRO is now looking to expand the PoC across its operations to include additional content, including user-generated information.

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