Italian luxury sportscar maker Lamborghini understands responsiveness and speed. For over a decade, the famed Lamborghini Diablo with a top speed of 200+ mph held the title of world's fastest production car. But when the automaker needed to update its aging Web infrastructure, it turned to Amazon Web Services.

According to an AWS case study, Lamborghini's website had reached the end of its lifecyle. Maintenance was becoming a burden and the system lacked sufficient bandwidth to handle spurts in traffic – effectively putting the kibosh on any new Web initiatives. In this age of Internet and social marketing, this was an untenable situation for any company, but especially a company of this calibre. They needed to implement a new solution as quickly as possible.

Lamborghini figured it could go in one of three directions: an on-premise datacenter, a traditional hosting provider, or cloud computing. Purchasing and managing their own Web servers was considered too costly and relying on a local datacenter raised concerns over scalability. In the final analysis, cloud computing was selected as the most viable option for its scalability, flexibility, and up-front cost savings. Of the available cloud platforms, the carmaker went with Amazon, citing analyst recommendations as a main driver.

Lamborghini used the AWS self-service portal to design a scalable Web architecture that takes advantage of Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon CloudWatch. The website is integrated with TYPO3 on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.

The project did not take long to carry out. Lamborghini prepared the development and test environment in a couple of days and the website went online in less than one month. Soon after the migration, the updated site was able to support a 250% burst in visitors that occurred in conjunction with a new product launch.

Digital Marketing Manager at Automobili Lamborghini, Roberto Ciacci, reported: "We reduced the cost of our infrastructure by 50%, while at the same time achieving better performance and scalability. Today our time-to-market is close to zero."