Case Study: Edmunds.com saves $100,000 and processes 50 million images in 8 days with Amazon Web Services

Edmunds Saves $100,000 in Year One by Going Serverless on AWS

Edmunds, the U.S.-based car-shopping website and app used by over 20 million people monthly, needed to reprocess a 50 million–photo library into multiple new aspect ratios and resolutions under a tight deadline. Their existing Cloudera MapReduce approach would have taken months to build, required managing new clusters, and added at least $10,000 per month in costs.

The team built a serverless pipeline on AWS using AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena in days, processing 50 million images into 700 million variants in eight days for a one‑time cost of $6,000. The solution met the deadline, delivered roughly $100,000 in first‑year savings versus traditional infrastructure, enabled an archiving feature that reduced photos from 1.5B to 800M (60 TB to 40 TB), and made future image transformations and ML integrations fast and simple.

Edmunds.com

Nitin Mahajan

Executive Director for Service Engineering