Boosting Innovation and Performance Using AWS Serverless Solutions with Azuga

Azuga, a subsidiary of Bridgestone, is a telematics company that provides solutions focused on safety and compliance. The company began with the vision to use fleet management software in a way that supported drivers rather than making them feel policed by technology. It now serves more than 13,000 commercial fleets.

Azuga was born on AWS in 2013. In 2017, Bharadwaj attended an AWS Dev Days conference, where he frequently heard discussion about AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, NoSQL database service, and AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service. However, he didn’t get the chance to experiment with these technologies until a few years later. In 2019, when Azuga launched a new project initiative, the company partnered with AntStack, a firm specializing in helping businesses build on serverless architecture.

Adopting serverless architecture required a mindset shift. The collaboration with AntStack helped Azuga see the possibilities of serverless and create a solid foundation for its serverless architecture. Azuga’s engineers picked up the basics quickly and created proofs of concept using their preferred stack with insights from AntStack. After benchmarking, the serverless stack won out, and Azuga decided to take the leap. “Doing the proofs of concept with AntStack gave us the confidence that we needed,” says Bharadwaj. “We started off right, with the right tooling and frameworks, because AntStack helped us. They were the catalyst for us to embrace serverless.”

Since the initial proof of concept, Azuga has adopted serverless across the company, building new projects with serverless solutions and modernizing many existing services using serverless architecture on AWS. Around 50 percent of the company’s solutions are serverless as of 2025. In addition to AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB, Azuga uses Amazon Aurora Serverless, an on-demand, auto scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system built for the cloud. It also began using Node.js as its preferred coding language. This created potential for Azuga’s frontend engineers to become full-stack engineers because the language is simple for them to pick up.

Serverless has boosted the efficiency of Azuga’s services. Using AWS Lambda and Lambda@Edge—a service to run code closer to application users—Azuga’s web application loads pages 20 percent faster, even in weak network conditions.

Azuga’s video telematics platform analyzes driving behavior by processing video feeds from vehicle cameras (driver-facing and road-facing cameras as well as auxiliary camera feeds) in commercial fleets, rewarding safe drivers. Using automatic scaling through AWS Lambda, Azuga can process millions of videos within minutes. “Our video solution is a cornerstone of our offerings,” says Bharadwaj. “It is fully serverless on AWS and built for extreme scalability.”

Adopting AWS serverless services has accelerated innovation at the company. “Today, we are building far more services on serverless than we did in the traditional Java environment last year,” says Bharadwaj. With a growing number of full-stack engineers, the team can code, test, and deploy independently, without having multiple layers of approval processes. Additionally, serverless architecture reduces concerns about load management and capacity planning because services scale automatically. “We no longer have to worry about infrastructure, and as full-stack engineers, we have complete control over our work,” Bharadwaj explains. “This gives us time to focus on innovation.”

Using AWS Lambda encourages Azuga to think modularly, and it reduces the blast radius if something were to go wrong. If there is an issue with one of the functions, the impact is limited to that particular function and doesn’t become a system-wide problem. “With serverless, you don’t need a long list of tool chains,” says Jeevan Dongre, cofounder and CEO of AntStack. “The serverless mindset is all about connecting the dots. You are no longer responsible for making the dots, which is much more expensive.”

By embracing serverless, Azuga is driving toward using cloud-based architecture across the board. It is replacing its existing technology with AWS services such as Amazon EventBridge, a service to build event-driven applications at scale, and AWS Elemental MediaConvert, which transcodes file-based content into live stream assets and can be used in conjunction with serverless services such as AWS Lambda to create serverless video transcoding workflows. “We want to be serverless first,” says Bharadwaj.

 

“Customers who have tested serverless have not gone back to anything else,” says Dongre. “They become serverless fans.”

Azuga is also doing a proof of concept for Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant for accelerating software development. The company expects Amazon Q will help further streamline the serverless developer experience, helping developers build applications faster. “Using AWS and serverless, we’re going to be extremely productive, freeing up time to focus on innovation and build differentiators for the business,” says Bharadwaj.