Indonesian e-commerce company Tokopedia was launched in 2009 to help millions of Indonesian businesses connect to the digital economy and sell globally. Its e-commerce site had faced availability issues due to unreliable network connections and difficulty scaling its IT environment, particularly databases. This hinders Tokopedia from scaling to meet the exponential spike in demand of the e-commerce boom during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The challenge faced in flexibility to scale and scaling in time also disrupts its monthly online sales event, Waktu Indonesia Belanja (Indonesia shopping time), when merchants concurrently hold sales promotions from the 25th until the last day of the month. Sales revenue for both merchants and Tokopedia were impacted.
Cloud Comrade helped Tokopedia expand its business by innovating its cloud infrastructure in 2021, migrating over 30 mission-critical workloads applications (including e-mail marketing and payments) from locally-leased data centers to AWS. The migration was completed in seven months with near-zero downtime to Tokopedia’s e-commerce site, and enabled the site to achieve higher levels of automation, scalability, and uptime.
Cloud Comrade first took the time to understand Tokopedia’s IT landscape, before setting up an AWS Landing Zone for a multi-account environment on AWS. The team worked closely with the AWS Professional Services team to establish a secure foundation and detailed plan for an agile migration from a complex on-premises environment. As Tokopedia was using older versions of operating systems, Cloud Comrade helped the company to modernize its IT infrastructure in order to comply with inherent platform security features on AWS, resulting in an improved security posture for Tokopedia.
AWS services were used for mission-critical workloads including payments, as well as storage of millions of product images and database backups. Using Amazon Aurora, Tokopedia is able to scale the network in seconds to handle the large increase in active users during peak sales periods each month. Tokopedia also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) to store millions of product images and data records to automate database updating and maximize uptime.
Benefits
Through this cloud infrastructure innovation project, Cloud Comrade is enabling Tokopedia (a technology company with the largest domestic marketplace in Indonesia and that contributes more than 1% of the country’s GDP) to empower local businesses to thrive throughout the country.
Tokopedia recognized that as more customers shift to online activities and are becoming more demanding than ever, they need to innovate to meet this shift in consumer expectations. With its deep expertise in cloud and established footprint across Southeast Asia markets, Cloud Comrade helped Tokopedia transform its digital infrastructure to enhance customer experience by migrating to AWS Cloud. This enabled Tokopedia to connect more than 9.7 million merchants to the digital economy, reach a wider customer base, and enhance its e-commerce network reliability. Cloud Comrade’s bespoke AWS Cloud services provided Tokopedia with the ability to fully reap the speed, responsiveness, and scalability of AWS Cloud. Tokopedia is also now able to process data in real-time for precise business insights. This gives them visibility to high-quality and accurate data to make informed decisions in their business growth, meeting their goals for data-driven transformation and customer innovation.
Cloud Comrade created an optimized AWS environment for Tokopedia that enabled real-time scalability to be achieved during peak sales periods, leveraging AWS’s managed database services that provide 99.99% availability. By setting up automated patching and upgrades of individual database engines, Cloud Comrade helped Tokopedia cut down person hours. Cloud Comrade also made sure that during the migration, the Tokopedia site was kept up and running 24/7; engineers could also pursue ongoing site development work without being affected by the large-scale migration. This allowed Tokopedia to continue to deliver a good user experience to buyers and merchants on the site.
