Grab Drives 50% Efficiencies with MongoDB Atlas

Grab is Southeast Asia's leading 'super application,' offering a wide range of services, targeting both consumers and businesses, including deliveries, mobility, financial services, enterprise and more.

Their range of applications, such as the popular Grab Taxi, Grab Pay, Grab Mart, Grab Ads, and more, count approximately 38 million active users monthly across 500 cities and eight countries.

Managing a high volume of constantly growing users and handling regular spikes in demand and activity means that Grab needs to maintain a robust, scalable, and flexible digital infrastructure.

Presenting at MongoDB.local Singapore in 2024, Grab shared their journey of migrating one of their key service apps-GrabKios-from the Community Edition of MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas. Grab also described how they are expanding their use of MongoDB to support semantic search.

"Transitioning to MongoDB Atlas was not just a migration-it was a strategic move aimed at enhancing our database infrastructure," said Jude Dulaj Lakshan De Croos, Database Engineering Manager at Grab.

A smooth transition to MongoDB Atlas

Grab's journey with MongoDB Atlas began with the realization that their existing database infrastructure, while functional, was not equipped to handle the scale and complexity of their operations.

Grab's eventual migration to MongoDB Atlas was meticulously planned and executed, including extensive testing to ensure a smooth transition.

During the critical testing phase, the creation of a replica "prod clone" environment, allowed Grab to test and refine their migration strategy. This minimized the possibility of unforeseen issues.

The migration also involved the use of Mongomirror. This facilitated the seamless transfer of data from Grab's self-hosted clusters to MongoDB Atlas.

"We were able to ensure that migration was actually smooth and ran without any issues," said Swarit Arora, Senior Database Engineer at Grab.

MongoDB Atlas's developer data platform offers Grab high levels of flexibility and scalability, accommodating Grab's fast growth (the company recorded a 23% revenue growth YoY in 2024) in an ever-changing digital landscape. MongoDB Atlas also delivers unique automation and streamlining capabilities, as well as enterprise-grade support which led to improved process and database management efficiency.

Efficiency gains with greater scalability, flexibility, performance

MongoDB Atlas provided Grab with an automated, scalable, and secure platform, which empowered its engineering teams to focus on product development rather than database maintenance.

"With MongoDB Atlas, we don't have to worry about the scaling changes. And with hands-on security we can deliver secure and fast applications," said Arora. "Being able to configure the exact resources required and then scale up and down based on our requirements is a plus. Considering we don't have to manage the scalability part, this is, I think, saving us around 50% of the time."

Furthermore, MongoDB Atlas delivers proactive recommendations to Grab's team. For example, MongoDB Atlas's Performance Advisor saves the team time by delivering real-time insights and recommendations to optimize query performance, ultimately reducing manual management tasks and increasing database efficiency.

"It is now easy to set up our MongoDB clusters compared to what we were doing when we self-hosted, which was more time-consuming," added Arora. "Secondly, if we are required to upgrade the cluster version, it is as easy as the click of a button."

Dedicated analytics nodes mean that Grab's team is able to enhance the analytical capabilities of any application running on MongoDB.

The successful migration to MongoDB Atlas has positioned Grab to explore new possibilities, including leveraging MongoDB's advanced features for use cases such as semantic search and AI applications.

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