Super App Grab Partners with ScyllaDB

Southeast Asia’s leading super app taps ScyllaDB’s real-time NoSQL database for high-performance, low-latency operations

PALO ALTO, CALIF. — August 28 — ScyllaDB today announced that Southeast Asia’s leading super app, Grab, is using ScyllaDB Enterprise to support real-time data processing and time series data for the millions of transactions it processes every day.

Grab offers a wide range of everyday services such as on-demand rides, food and package delivery and mobile payments. The Grab app has been downloaded over 152 million times and its service area covers Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Every Grab transaction needs to be processed in near-real time.

To ensure its operations stay fast, responsive and reliable, Grab developed a microservices architecture based on data streaming with Apache Kafka. These streams not only power Grab’s business, they provide a vital source of intelligence.

Grab’s engineering teams aggregate and republish the streams using a low-latency metadata store built on ScyllaDB Enterprise, a massively scalable real-time NoSQL database designed for high-performance applications. Coded ‘close to the metal’ in C++, ScyllaDB Enterprise offers high availability with improved latency, throughput, resource efficiency and fault tolerance.

Grab’s Trust and Safety Engineering team uses the metadata stored in ScyllaDB to monitor and analyze activity streams for signs of illicit transactions. It needs to stay one step ahead of scammers who are constantly evolving their strategies, looking for ways to cheat the platform.

“In addition to the Trust and Safety Engineering team, the ScyllaDB Enterprise data store serves a number of other use cases across the organization,” said Brian Trenbeath, a Technical Program Manager at Grab.

“ScyllaDB does a fantastic job for us in helping Grab process the massive amounts of data generated everyday, and turns it into usable information for the rest of the business. When you deal with millions and millions of events coming in everyday, being able to efficiently find and remove duplicate events, pull together aggregate data, and run joins across multiple real-time streams can be challenging. But ScyllaDB is enabling us to do just that, and we’ve just gotten started!”

Brian Trenbeath also praised ScyllaDB’s cost-efficiency and low operational overhead.

“During our busiest periods, rush hour and the weekend, peak load can hit many tens of thousands of operations per second. ScyllaDB Enterprise handles everything with ease using just one five-node AWS cluster.”

As ScyllaDB’s premium database product, ScyllaDB Enterprise offers the highest level of QA, scale, security and performance testing, along with client-customized hot-fixes, formal EOL policies, and 24/7 support from the ScyllaDB development team. ScyllaDB also offers ScyllaDB Enterprise as a managed service, ScyllaDB Cloud, and provides an open-source distribution.

About ScyllaDB

ScyllaDB is the real-time big data database. Fully compatible with Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB embraces a shared-nothing approach that increases throughput and storage capacity as much as 10X that of Cassandra. AdGear, AppNexus, CERN, Comcast, Grab, IBM, Intel, Investing.com, L3 Technologies, MediaMath, Ola Cabs, Samsung and many more leading companies have adopted ScyllaDB to realize order-of-magnitude performance improvements and reduce hardware costs. ScyllaDB was founded by the team responsible for the KVM hypervisor and is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Magma Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Ventures, TLV Partners, Western Digital Capital and Wing Venture Capital. For more information: ScyllaDB.com

Media Contact
Chris Ulbrich
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