Dive into the chaos and triumph of real-time optimisation in the face of high database utilisation! This article recounts a developer's adrenaline-fueled journey of transforming crisis into innovation—optimising campaign usage count tracking through highly concurrent in-memory caching and periodic database updates. Embrace the madness, thrive in the challenge, and discover a bold approach to tackling database bottlenecks head-on!| Grab Tech
Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) is central to Grab’s mission of delivering valuable, personalised experiences to millions of users across Southeast Asia. Achieving this requires a deep understanding of individual preferences, such as their favorite foods, relevant advertisements, spending habits, and more. This personalisation is driven by recommender models, which depend heavily on high-quality representations of the user. Traditionally, these models have relied on hundreds to th...| Grab Tech
Partner Gateway serves as Grab's secure interface for exposing APIs to third-party entities, facilitating seamless interactions between Grab's hosted services and external consumers. This blog delves into the implementation of Apache Pinot within Partner Gateway for advanced metrics tracking. Discover the challenges, trade-offs, and solutions the team navigated to optimize performance and ensure reliability in this innovative integration.| Grab Tech
At Grab, our decade-old Go monorepo had become a 214GB monster with 13 million commits, causing 4-minute replication delays and crippling developer productivity. Through custom migration tooling and strategic history pruning, we achieved a 99.9% reduction in commits while preserving all critical functionality. The result? 36% faster clones, eliminated single points of failure, and a 99.4% improvement in replication performance—transforming our biggest infrastructure bottleneck into a develo...| Grab Tech
Discover how Grab is revolutionising data discovery with the power of AI and LLMs. Dive into our journey as we overcome challenges, build groundbreaking tools like HubbleIQ, and transform the way our employees find and access data. Get ready to be inspired by our innovative approach and learn how you can harness the potential of AI to unlock the full value of your organisation's data.| Grab Tech
Grab has embarked on a transformative journey to overhaul its enterprise data ecosystem, addressing challenges posed by the rapid growth of its business spanning across ride-hailing, food delivery, and financial services. With the increasing complexity of its data landscape, Grab transitioned from a centralised data warehouse model to a data mesh architecture, a decentralised approach treating data as a product owned by domain-specific teams. The article shares the motivations behind the chan...| Grab Tech
Grab's Engineering team solves critical transportation challenges and makes transport freedom a reality for 620 million people in Southeast Asia.| Grab Tech
Introduction In this post, we outline how we transformed the way we serve data for our machine learning (ML) models and why we chose Amazon Aurora Postgres as the storage layer for our new feature store. At Grab, we have always been at the forefront of leveraging technology to enhance our services and provide the best possible experience for our platform users. This journey has led us to transition from a traditional approach to a more sophisticated and efficient ML feature store. Over the ye...| Grab Tech
When you're running 1000+ microservices across Southeast Asia's most complex transport and delivery platform, 'good enough' stops being good enough. Discover how Grab tackled the challenge of migrating from Consul to Istio across a hybrid infrastructure spanning AWS and GCP, separate AWS organizations, and diverse deployment models. This isn't your typical service mesh migration story. We share the real challenges of designing resilient architecture for massive scale, the unconventional decis...| Grab Tech
DispatchGym is a research framework that supports reinforcement learning (RL) studies for dispatch systems. A system that matches bookings with drivers. Designed to be efficient, cost-effective, and accessible, this article outlines its principles, research benefits, and real-world applications.| Grab Tech
Supporting real-time data streaming enables our internal users to build intelligent applications and services, a crucial aspect of continuously out-serving our community. Read this article to understand our journey of building a real-time data streaming platform from pure Infrastructure-as-Code towards a more sophisticated control plane, and the benefits of this solution.| Grab Tech
Abstract The Integrity Data Platform (IDP) team decided to rewrite one of our heavy Queries Per Second (QPS) Golang microservices in Rust. It resulted in 70% infrastructure savings at a similar performance, but was not without its pitfalls. This article will elaborate on: How we picked what to rewrite in Rust. Approach taken to tackle the rewrite. The pitfalls and speed bumps along the way. Was it worthwhile? Introduction Grab is predominantly based on a microservice architecture, with the va...| Grab Tech
Introducing FlinkSQL interactive solution to enhance real-time stream processing exploration. The new system simplifies stream processing development, automates production workflows and democratises access to real-time insights. Read on about our journey that begun at addressing challenges encountered with the previous Zeppelin notebook-based solution to the current state of integration with and productionisation of FlinkSQL.| Grab Tech
This article outlines Grab's journey towards enabling a seamless single sign-on experience for its numerous internal applications. It addresses the challenges of fragmented authentication and authorisation systems and introduces Dex, an open-source federated OpenID Connect provider, as the chosen solution. The document details the implementation of Dex, its key features, and discusses future plans for an unified authorisation model.| Grab Tech
When Grab's Machine Learning team sought to automate support queries, a failed chatbot experiment sparked an unexpected pivot: GrabGPT. Born from the need to harness Large Language Models (LLMs) internally, this tool became a go-to resource for employees. Offering private, auditable access to models like GPT and Gemini, the author shares his journey of turning failed experiments into strategic wins.| Grab Tech
The SOP-driven Large Language Model (LLM) agent framework, revolutionises enterprise AI by integrating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure reliable execution and boost productivity. Achieving over 99.8% accuracy, it offers versatile automation tools and app development, making AI solutions 10 times faster. The framework addresses LLM challenges by structuring SOPs as a tree, enabling intuitive workflow creation. The framework aims to transform enterprise operations and explore indu...| Grab Tech
Managing 4,000+ data pipelines demanded a smarter approach to stability. We built a comprehensive automation solution that enhances Hugo's monitoring capabilities, streamlines issue diagnosis, and significantly reduces on-call workload. Explore our architecture, implementation, and the impact of automated healing features.| Grab Tech
Discover how Grab revolutionised its Spark observability with StarRocks! We transformed our monitoring capabilities by moving from a fragmented system to a unified, high-performance platform. Learn about our journey from the initial Iris tool to a robust solution that tackles limitations with real-time and historical data analysis, all powered by StarRocks. Explore the architecture, data model, and advanced analytics that enable us to provide deeper insights and recommendations for optimising...| Grab Tech
Find out how Passkey makes logging in easier and safer by introducing passwordless authentication. Learn how this new feature works, the benefits it brings, and why it's a game-changer for your security and convenience. Dive in to see how Grab is making your app experience smoother and more secure.| Grab Tech
Discover how we revolutionised our product configuration management SDK, reducing initialisation time by up to 90%. Learn about the challenges we faced with cold starts and the phased approach we took to optimise the SDK's performance.| Grab Tech
Learn about GrabX, Grab’s central platform for product configuration management. This article discusses the steps taken to optimise the SDK, aiming to improve resource utilisation, reduce costs, and accelerate internal adoption.| Grab Tech
Vector similarity search has revolutionised data retrieval, particularly in the context of Retrieval-Augmented Generation in conjunction with advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it sometimes falls short when dealing with complex or nuanced queries. In this post, we explore our experimentation with a simple yet effective approach to mitigate this shortcoming by combining the efficiency of vector similarity search with the contextual understanding of LLMs.| Grab Tech
Read about the evolution of Catwalk, Grab's model serving platform, from its inception to its current state. Discover how it has evolved to meet the needs of Grab's growing machine learning model serving requirements.| Grab Tech
Unleashing the potential of machine learning (ML) with Grab's Chimera Sandbox. This scalable platform facilitates rapid development and experimentation of ML solutions, offering deep integration with Large Language Models and a variety of compute instances. Discover how it's driving AI innovation at Grab.| Grab Tech
Dive into our journey of improving in-app translation experience amidst a post-COVID tourism boom. Discover how we overcame language detection hurdles, crafted an in-house translation model, and implemented stringent quality checks, all while maintaining cost efficiency.| Grab Tech
With cross-platform monitoring, a common problem is the difficulty in getting comprehensive and in-depth views on metrics, making it tough to see the big picture. Read to find out how the Data Tech team ideated Iris to turn observations into actionable insights for enhanced decision-making.| Grab Tech
Grab's data streaming infrastructure runs in the cloud across multiple Availability Zones for high availability and resilience, but this also incurs staggering network traffic cost. In this article, we describe how enabling our Kafka consumers to fetch from the closest replica helped significantly improve the cost efficiency of our design.| Grab Tech
