Reducing costs by 35% by migrating to AWS with Cabonline Group

Cabonline has a large number of brands and a strong presence in more than 60 local markets in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. As it grew, Cabonline acquired other taxi companies, which were often regionally operated. As a result, Cabonline had a complex, hybrid, multicloud infrastructure that was costly to maintain and difficult to manage.

To reduce costs and simplify operations for its lean IT team, Cabonline wanted to consolidate its infrastructure. The company chose AWS because it offered a flexible, scalable, resilient suite of cloud services that reduces costs and improves security posture. Teaming up with Playground Tech, Cabonline met its migration goals by participating in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), which helps organizations accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journey using an outcome-driven methodology.

Cabonline and Playground Tech kicked off the migration with a framework assessment through AWS MAP. The teams used the AWS MAP recommendations for high-level guidance and then worked together to solve complexities unique to Cabonline. Throughout the migration, Playground Tech helped train and upskill Cabonline’s cloud team so that it could take ownership of the modernization journey going forward. “It was definitely not your meat-and-potatoes migration using AWS MAP,” says Joakim Jarsäter, senior cloud engineer at Playground Tech. “Cabonline has a lot of complex integrations with different municipalities and companies throughout the Nordic countries, so we had to get creative to support those legacy protocols on the network layer.”

Adopting Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which organizations can use to build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications across any environment, Cabonline moved many of its applications to containers. “The infrastructure on AWS is much simpler,” says Liam Salomonsson, head of the chief technology officer office for Cabonline. “It’s easier to roll back changes and to deploy new features. Everything gives hours back to our development team.”

The streamlined infrastructure also enhances security and governance. The majority of Cabonline’s customers are municipalities that are fulfilling public-service trips—such as transporting children to school or elderly people to the hospital—so the company must comply with regional regulations. “Our chief information security officer is very happy about the move to AWS,” says Salomonsson. “It makes his life easier because it is simple to demonstrate security and compliance.”

Cabonline also built a driver recommendation engine using Amazon SageMaker AI, which provides fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows for building, training, and deploying AI models for any use case. The engine provides near real-time recommendations to drivers about where to go to increase the chances of getting a passenger. Because drivers can be more efficient and target demand, they spend less time idling, which increases sustainability and profit. “We noticed that new taxi drivers using the recommendation engine end up earning more than seasoned drivers who’re only relying on their instincts,” says Salomonsson.

By migrating 300 applications and 200 virtual machines to AWS, Cabonline can do more with a small team. “Using AWS, we’ve increased developer productivity by an estimated 15–20 percent while reducing infrastructure and operational costs by 35 percent,” says Salomonsson. And by implanting its driver recommendation engine that’s built on Amazon SageMaker AI, Cabonline increased the income by an estimated 10–15 percent for drivers that follow the recommendations.

Cabonline plans to continue modernizing its infrastructure, including continuing to migrate applications to containers on Amazon EKS, to stay competitive with newer, agile brands. With less time spent on infrastructure, Cabonline’s developers can also focus on differentiating innovations, such as adapting the driver recommendation engine to navigate self-driving vehicles in the future. “The largest benefit of the migration is the simplification,” says Salomonsson. “The speed at which we can build and deploy new developments is huge.”