My Four Wheels - Serverless Migration with Bref

Challenge

My Four Wheels is one of the UK's largest driving school networks, connecting learner drivers with over 500 driving instructors nationwide. Their Laravel platform handles:

• Learner bookings — Matching students with local instructors
• Instructor management — Franchise operations, scheduling, availability
• Training programs — ADI (Approved Driving Instructor) qualification courses

As the business grew, the platform struggled during peak periods — marketing campaigns, seasonal demand, and high-traffic booking windows caused performance bottlenecks that affected both learners and instructors.

Solution

We migrated the Laravel application to AWS Lambda using Bref — a PHP runtime for serverless. This allowed the team to keep their existing Laravel codebase while gaining the scalability of serverless architecture.

Why Bref?

• Keep Laravel — No need to rewrite in a different language
• Instant scaling — Lambda handles traffic spikes automatically
• Pay-per-request — No idle server costs
• Zero server management — No patching or capacity planning

Architecture

• Compute: AWS Lambda with Bref PHP runtime
• API: API Gateway for HTTP routing
• Database: RDS MySQL
• Assets: CloudFront CDN
• Queue: SQS for background jobs (emails, notifications)

Results

• Peak traffic handled — Marketing campaigns no longer cause slowdowns
• Improved reliability — Platform stays responsive during busy booking periods
• Reduced ops overhead — No servers to manage or scale manually
• Cost efficiency — Pay only for actual usage

Tech Stack

• Laravel 10 on AWS Lambda via Bref
• API Gateway
• RDS MySQL
• CloudFront
• SQS
• Serverless Framework

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