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
Scaling issues with your Laravel app? Get in touch — we can help you go serverless without a rewrite.