Zoomcar Paves the Road for Data-Driven Operations and Supports Accelerated Growth on AWS

Zoomcar is a marketplace for car sharing in emerging markets, with over 25,000 cars on its technology-driven platform across India, Indonesia, and Egypt. Zoomcar empowers host entrepreneurs to safely and easily share their cars to earn additional passive income. Guests in the Zoomcar community enjoy a diverse, affordable selection of cars to unlock memorable driving experiences with friends and family. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Zoomcar employs over 250 people and operates in more than 100 cities across India, Indonesia, and Egypt.

Since its inception in 2013, Zoomcar has grown to over 3 million active users. Anirudh Lamba, director of strategic partnerships and alliances at Zoomcar, shares, "We transitioned from being an asset-heavy car-owning company to a marketplace business model. Since then, we've expanded from 8,000 cars to over 20,000 vehicles shared on our platform, operating in more than 100 cities in India, Indonesia, and Egypt.”

For Zoomcar, data is crucial. Every day, the business processes gigabytes of data from applications, IoT devices connected to vehicles, and clickstreams. Zoomcar sought to utilize this vast data for valuable insights amidst rapid growth. These insights include providing vehicle owners, also known as “hosts,” with improved clarity on their ratings and earnings, while offering renters, referred to as “guests,” the option to customize their car selection.

Vishal Ramrakhyani, vice president and head of engineering at Zoomcar, says, "Our data sets have tripled in size over the past two years, with millions of incoming data points from app and website users’ click analytics, IoT devices in cars, and internal SQL and NoSQL datastores.”

Zoomcar runs its application platform on AWS and uses Amazon S3 as a data lake to store streaming data. Additionally, it uses Amazon Redshift as its fully managed data warehousing solution. To support its growing data volumes, the business decided to expand its utilization of AWS by implementing a centralized, scalable data solution that incorporates AWS analytics services.

The business developed an analytics hub on AWS that makes use of Amazon API Gateway to receive application and clickstream data, which is subsequently stored in Amazon S3. The company processes 500 million real-time IoT data points from on-board diagnostic devices, providing easy accessibility for analytical queries through Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

Previously, Zoomcar had multiple Amazon Redshift clusters in its data warehouse infrastructure. However, the company decided to consolidate and optimize these clusters. This consolidation effort resulted in an impressive 50 percent reduction in operating costs by lowering data management expenses. Additionally, the optimization exercise improved the performance of data processing and analysis. Moving pipelines to Amazon EMR and utilizing Amazon Athena reduced the runtime of time-consuming tasks like computing business metrics from hours to under 30 minutes, minimizing failures even as data volumes increased.