In a tech-driven field, staying updated isn’t an option—it’s essential. At Grab, we’re committed to providing top-notch technology services. However, keeping pace can be demanding. At one point in time, our GitLab instance was trailing by roughly 14 months of releases. This blog post recounts our experience updating and formulating a consistent upgrade routine. Recognising the need to upgrade Our team, while skilled, was still learning GitLab’s complexities. Regular stability issues left us little time for necessary upgrades. Understanding the importance of upgrades for our oper ..read more

Grab has an in-house Risk Management platform called GrabDefence which relies on ingesting large amounts of data gathered from upstream services to power our heuristic risk rules and data science models in real time. Fig 1. GrabDefence aggregates data from different upstream services As Grab’s business grows, so does the amount of data. It becomes imperative that the data which fuels our risk systems is of reliable quality as any data discrepancy or missing data could impact fraud detection and prevention capabilities. We need to quickly detect any data anomalies, which is where data obse ..read more

Introduction This article introduces the GrabX Decision Engine, an internal open-source package that offers a comprehensive framework for designing and analysing experiments conducted on online experiment platforms. The package encompasses a wide range of functionalities, including a pre-experiment advisor, a post-experiment analysis toolbox, and other advanced tools. In this article, we explore the motivation behind the development of these functionalities, their integration into the unique ecosystem of Grab’s multi-sided marketplace, and how these solutions strengthen the culture and calibre ..read more

Introduction Iris (/ˈaɪrɪs/), a name inspired by the Olympian mythological figure who personified the rainbow and served as the messenger of the gods, is a comprehensive observability platform for Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) jobs. Just as the mythological Iris connected the gods to humanity, our Iris platform bridges the gap between raw data and meaningful insights, serving the needs of data-driven organisations. Specialising in meticulous monitoring and tracking of Spark and Presto jobs, Iris stands as a transformative tool for peak observability and effective decision-mak ..read more

Grab is Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, providing a suite of services that brings essential needs to users throughout the region. Its offerings include ride-hailing, food delivery, parcel delivery, mobile payments, and more. With safety, efficiency, and user-centered design at heart, Grab remains dedicated to solving everyday issues and improving the lives of millions. As the app continues to expand with more features, Grab identified the need for a consistent, high-quality experience for new users who may have limited storage space or restricted internet bandwidth. Read to find out more ab ..read more

Introduction In the domain of data processing, data analysts run their ad hoc queries on the data lake. The lake serves as an interface between our analytics and production environment, preventing downstream queries from impacting upstream data ingestion pipelines. To ensure efficient data processing in the data lake, choosing appropriate storage formats is crucial. The vanilla data lake solution is built on top of cloud object storage with Hive metastore, where data files are written in Parquet format. Although this setup is optimised for scalable analytics query patterns, it struggles to han ..read more

The Grab superapp offers a comprehensive array of services from ride-hailing and food delivery to financial services. This creates multifaceted user journeys, traversing homepages, product pages, checkouts, and interactions with diverse content, including advertisements and promo codes. Background: Why ads and attribution matter in our superapp Ads are crucial for Grab in driving user engagement and supporting our ecosystem by seamlessly connecting users with our services. In the ever-evolving world of advertising, the ability to gauge the impact of marketing investments takes on pivotal signi ..read more

In the fast-paced world of on-demand delivery, maintaining safe marketplaces is a complex undertaking. Grab, a leading superapp in Southeast Asia, operates GrabFood and GrabMart, two popular marketplaces that connect consumers with a wide range of food and daily necessities. With more than 100k listings for different items updated daily by our merchants across eight different countries, Grab is rising to the challenge of ensuring that its marketplaces remain compliant with its own policies, government regulations as well as platform policies. This article explores how Grab emplo ..read more

Introduction In this digital age, companies collect multitudes of data that enable the tracking of business metrics and performance. Over the years, data analytics tools for data storage and processing have evolved from the days of Excel sheets and macros to more advanced Map Reduce model tools like Spark, Hadoop, and Hive. This evolution has allowed companies, including Grab, to perform modern analytics on the data ingested into the Data Lake, empowering them to make better data-driven business decisions. This form of data will be referenced within this document as “Offline Data”. With innova ..read more

Introduction Coban - Grab’s real-time data streaming platform - has been operating Kafka on Kubernetes with Strimzi in production for about two years. In a previous article (Zero trust with Kafka), we explained how we leveraged Strimzi to enhance the security of our data streaming offering. In this article, we are going to describe how we improved the fault tolerance of our initial design, to the point where we no longer need to intervene if a Kafka broker is unexpectedly terminated. Problem statement We operate Kafka in the AWS Cloud. For the Kafka on Kubernetes design described in this artic ..read more