Lyft to expand its use of Amazon’s public cloud services

US-based ride-sharing service Lyft has made a commitment to expand its use of Amazon’s public cloud services even further to support its push into the self-driving car space.

The firm already relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power the backend systems underpinning its ride-haling platform (which is reportedly used to coordinate more than 50 million journeys a month) as well as the company’s public-facing websites and financial applications.

As such, the firm already makes use of the Amazon DynamoDB database technology to help its drivers optimise their journeys.

This technology – in combination with the Amazon Elastic Container Service Kubernetes and its Lambda serverless offering – has also been used by Lyft to support its adoption of microservices.

It also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Redshift to analyse the data generated by its operations, enabling the firm to hone its services by uncovering patterns in how people use its apps, such as predicting pick-up and drop-off points.

The company is, however, now intent on going deeper into Amazon’s public cloud product portfolio to support the expansion of its business into new areas, whereby users can use its services to hire bikes, scooters and autonomous vehicles.

This work – which will position Lyft as a “multi-modal” ride-hailing company – will see the firm ramp up its use AWS’s database, serverless, machine learning and data analytics offerings, the company confirmed. Read more about AWS

While Amazon, Google and Microsoft all claim to be picking up customers in every conceivable vertical market , it is the retail sector where the competition between the big three cloud giants is really starting to get interesting. There is currently a crisis unfolding in the open source world, with a number of companies changing their licensing to protect revenue. This has arisen due to a potentially toxic situation […]

Continue reading – Lyft commits to going ‘all-in’ with AWS to support autonomous vehicles push