Case Study: CarMax achieves rapid online innovation and scalable image storage with Microsoft Azure

CarMax drives online innovation in the cloud

CarMax, the U.S. used‑car retail leader with more than 22,000 employees and nearly 50,000 vehicles for sale, needed to accelerate its digital transformation as customers moved to mobile. Its on‑premises infrastructure was straining—especially for storing and serving high‑quality vehicle images—and the company ran separate PC and mobile sites that slowed feature development and prevented responsive, consistent experiences. To compete as an e‑commerce business, CarMax needed elastic storage, unified responsive design, and a faster Dev/Ops model.

CarMax rebuilt carmax.com on Microsoft Azure PaaS, moving images to Azure Blob Storage and adopting App Service, Azure SQL, Redis Cache, Service Bus and an active‑active, geo‑redundant hybrid architecture. The migration tripled image capacity, enabled dynamic image resizing and reliable delivery for 16 million monthly visitors, reduced provisioning from months to minutes, sped up prototyping and agile development, and positioned the company to move toward microservices and faster digital innovation.

CarMax

Brandon Linton

Solution Architect