It’s a challenge familiar to any longstanding business with an IT department: how to transition from their current physical, data center-based hardware infrastructure to the next-generation — implemented and maintained in the cloud.
Auto Trader — the largest automobile classifieds service in the United Kingdom and Ireland — recently decided it was time to make that crucial migration. The company’s site offers an array of services, including key information on vehicle valuation and seller reputation. It also hosts over 3,000 custom websites for local dealerships across the UK, who rely on Auto Trader to maintain their online presence.
All told, Auto Trader sees over 55 million visits to its platform every month. With over 10 million transactions completed annually and £330 million in revenue, in addition to the thousands of dealerships relying on its platform — this migration to the cloud was an undertaking with high stakes and little margin for error.
As it looked to switch these mission-critical services to Cloudflare, Auto Trader’s stack consisted of multiple differing technologies which included: PowerDNS (on-premises DNS), Verisign DNS (key external domains), Arbor (DDoS defence), and F5 (load balancing / WAF).
Utilising a variety of different products had downsides including a lack of API access or support for automation, necessitating workarounds and repetitive work. This increased complexity which made tasks more difficult than required — and Auto Trader had to buy each individual product for their specific use case.
Auto Trader Systems Engineer Mark Bell adds: “We wanted something that would combine all of our DNS, performance, and security needs into a single unified interface”.
With Cloudflare, all of these products are included in the same service, managed from a single integrated dashboard. That translates to major savings in overhead — no more hardware to maintain — and a user experience that’s vastly easier to navigate.
Cloudflare was one of several options Auto Trader considered: “We believe in performing as much due diligence as possible and as part of this we looked at the various offerings available in the marketplace,” Bell says. And after extensive research and internal discussion, there was a clear winner.