Challenge
With an average of 5 million hits per month, Mobiauto’s marketplace is one of the three largest in the Brazilian car market, where retailers and dealers have access to innovative services that help increase sales and buyers have a friendly website to consult ads and contact sellers.
The success of Mobiauto led the company to be acquired by Banco Pan[1], accelerating the expansion of the digital platform throughout Brazil. Of course, this evolution makes the challenge of guaranteeing the highest levels of performance and availability for users even greater.
To overcome it, Mobiauto’s DevOps team needed to expand and optimize its cache policy, which allows it to speed up content delivery, offer an even better user experience and minimize the amount of hits received on the origin infrastructure, avoiding overloads and increased costs to deliver the requests.
Solution
Aware of the results he could achieve with the use of edge computing, Guilherme Braga, CTO and co-founder of Mobiauto, already knew about Azion’s Edge Platform and chose to migrate Mobiauto’s applications in 2019, when the company was founded, enabling Mobiauto to enter the market with a great competitive advantage.
Using Edge Application and its Application Acceleration, Edge Cache and Image Processor modules, Mobiauto experts can go much further than traditional CDN and data center technologies. “Azion’s platform provides us with essential caching capabilities to accelerate content delivery,” says Bruno Guidone, Head of DevOps at Mobiauto.
Edge Cache enables the creation of custom cache rules that allow Mobiauto to combine the usability and ease of navigation of its platform and the delivery of static and dynamic content through an Edge Network composed of more than 100 edge locations, making the experience not only faster, but also reliable and secure against downtime.
In addition to the cache rules that fully adhere to Mobiauto’s needs, there is another important factor for page loading speed: the optimization of vehicle ad images that fill the website’s pages. With Image Processor, the size of each image file can be automatically reduced by up to 80% without impacting visual quality.
Results and impacts
Delivering content from Azion’s Edge gives Mobiauto’s DevOps team the flexibility to optimize the user experience. By creating advanced caching rules, Mobiauto significantly improved Core Web Vitals metrics such as First Contentful Paint (72%) and Speed Index (69%).
Using the Image Processor was also decisive in increasing performance, and Mobiauto reduced on average more than 40% of the size of its image files without compromising the visual quality of the photos. In practice, users can view photos of their dream vehicle more quickly and without missing any details.
All of this allows Mobiauto not only to offer the best user experience, but also to maintain its high levels of accessibility and SEO. At the same time, Mobiauto has reduced traffic on its origin infrastructure by more than 90%, which is crucial to avoid overloads, reduce costs and keep the service 100% available for its millions of users to buy and sell any time of the day.
In 2021, for example, Mobiauto launched a campaign on national television on some of the largest TV stations in Brazil. In the same minute that Mobiauto’s QR Code was displayed on the viewers’ screen, the application received more than 500,000 simultaneous accesses. “Azion was fundamental for us to hold this amount of access. Without the platform, we would need much more hardware resources to deliver so many requests simultaneously”, said Bruno Guidone.
According to Guidone, the success of the campaign that reached all over Brazil is also due to the support of Azion engineers, who did not leave Mobiauto alone and contributed by suggesting optimizations and helping with technical questions. “Azion’s team, with all of its experience, ended up providing us with key tips to optimize our applications”, completed the Head of DevOps.
With the flexibility of Azion’s platform, Mobiauto’s team has several edge-native tools to evolve its applications and accelerate the company’s growth. In 2021, for example, Mobiauto grew 35% YoY[2] despite all the adversities of the Covid-19 pandemic and quickly consolidated itself as one of the three largest marketplaces in the Brazilian automotive market.
“We really like the platform due to its ease of use. When we have any questions, the support team is always available to analyze the case and help resolve it. In addition, it’s very nice to have someone who really understands, not only about the platform, but also about Mobiauto’s business and all this network load that we receive, always with a lot of adherence. In that regard, it’s amazing.”
Bruno Guidone, Head of DevOps at Mobiauto
About Mobiauto
Mobiauto is a technology platform for the automotive sector that aims to promote greater efficiency and practicality in the purchase and sale of cars for its customers in Brazil, whether they are professional dealers or end consumers. With the entrepreneurial spirit of startups specialized in technology, Mobiauto celebrates significant growth results in the virtual commercialization of vehicles in the national market. In less than two years of operation, the company has already positioned itself as one of the three largest marketplaces in the car market in Brazil, having reached more than 5 million monthly hits. Founded in mid-2019 by economist Sant Clair Castro Jr. and Guilherme Braga, co-founder and CTO, Mobiauto was born with the seal of innovation and its mission is to remedy the pain of the market, with friendly classifieds and the best navigation experience in the sector.