Caylent Catalysts™
Serverless App
Design new cloud native applications by providing secure, reliable and scalable development foundation and pathway to a minimum viable product (MVP).
QSR Giant Migrates E-Commerce to AWS Serverless, Cutting Infrastructure Costs by 90%
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
At a glance
Taco Bell partnered with Caylent to execute a bold, ambitious migration to AWS serverless architecture for their e-commerce platform. Leveraging a headless commerce engine built by parent company Yum! Brands, the migration delivered transformative results: 90% reduction in infrastructure costs, 90% reduction in code complexity, and the ability to ship business value faster than ever before. This modernized, event-driven architecture now powers digital ordering for one of the world's most iconic quick-service restaurant brands.
Innovation in the QSR Space
Taco Bell is known for innovation in the quick-service restaurant space, but not many people know that they are striving to be second to none with technology. Since Glen Bell started serving tacos at the first Taco Bell location in 1962 in Downey, California, the brand has grown into a culture-centric, lifestyle brand that provides craveable, affordable Mexican-inspired food with bold flavors.
As part of Yum! Brands—which also owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and The Habit Burger Grill—Taco Bell has access to significant technology resources and innovation capabilities. Yum! Brands operates over 55,000 restaurants in more than 155 countries, with 98 percent of stores owned by franchisees. This massive scale requires robust, scalable digital infrastructure to support millions of daily transactions.
Parent company Yum! Brands built a headless commerce engine, and Taco Bell decided they wanted to migrate as quickly as possible using AWS and serverless. This was a big, bold, ambitious goal—and they decided to use Caylent and AWS to help them achieve it.
Problem
Like many large enterprises with legacy e-commerce systems, Taco Bell faced challenges with their existing infrastructure. Traditional architectures often struggle to handle the scale and variability of quick-service restaurant traffic, where demand can spike dramatically during promotional periods, late-night hours, or when viral menu items capture public attention.
The complexity of managing traditional infrastructure for e-commerce operations—including server provisioning, capacity planning, scaling, and maintenance—diverted engineering resources away from building features that directly serve customers. Additionally, the cost of maintaining always-on infrastructure, regardless of actual traffic levels, represented a significant and often inefficient expense.
For a brand serving over 42 million customers weekly across thousands of locations, the technology platform needed to be as innovative and forward-thinking as the menu and marketing that have made Taco Bell a cultural phenomenon.
“With the serverless solution, we've seen cost reductions of 90% for our infrastructure. We've also seen the reduction of complexity in our code by 90%. We've been able to ship business value faster than ever before.”
Robbie Kohler
Senior Director of Software Engineering
Solution
Caylent brought deep AWS expertise and serverless architecture experience to help Taco Bell execute their ambitious migration. Working alongside the Taco Bell engineering team, Caylent helped design and implement a fully serverless, event-driven architecture that transformed their e-commerce operations.
Taco Bell's new e-commerce systems on AWS utilize the following services:
- AWS Lambda – Serverless compute that runs code without provisioning or managing servers, enabling automatic scaling to handle any level of traffic.
- Amazon S3 – Highly scalable object storage for static assets, data, and application content.
- Amazon API Gateway – Fully managed service for creating, publishing, and managing APIs at any scale.
- Amazon EventBridge – Serverless event bus that connects application data from various sources, enabling event-driven architectures.
- Amazon DynamoDB – Fully managed NoSQL database delivering single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.
This serverless approach eliminates the need to manage infrastructure, automatically scales with demand, and follows a pay-per-use model that dramatically reduces costs during periods of lower traffic. The event-driven architecture enables loosely coupled services that are easier to develop, test, and deploy independently.
By leveraging Caylent's migration expertise and best practices, Taco Bell was able to accelerate their cloud journey and fully capitalize on everything AWS has to offer. The serverless model allowed their engineering team to focus on building customer-facing features rather than managing servers and infrastructure.
Business Impact
The migration to AWS serverless architecture delivered transformational results for Taco Bell's digital operations.
"With the serverless solution, we've seen cost reductions of 90% for our infrastructure," says Robbie Kohler, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Taco Bell. "We've seen the reduction of complexity in our code also by 90%. We've been able to ship business value faster than ever before."
The 90% infrastructure cost reduction represents a massive improvement in operational efficiency. With serverless, Taco Bell only pays for compute when code is actually running, eliminating the waste associated with idle server capacity.
The 90% reduction in code complexity translates directly to improved developer productivity and system maintainability. Simpler code means fewer bugs, easier onboarding for new team members, and faster iteration on new features.
Perhaps most importantly, the ability to ship business value faster than ever before positions Taco Bell to continue leading innovation in the QSR space. Whether launching new digital ordering features, integrating with delivery platforms, or creating new customer experiences, the serverless foundation enables rapid development and deployment.
This transformation demonstrates how even the largest, most established brands can modernize their technology stack to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, efficiency, and agility. Taco Bell's success with AWS serverless serves as a model for other enterprises looking to accelerate their digital transformation journey.
