How Rapido’s Technology Platform Is Adding Fuel To The Fire Of Ride Sharing

With Rapido, we created a disruptive service model which gave commuters in the city a whole new way to travel, with ease and speed. Rapido saw the opportunity in using bikes to provide taxi-service and use that free pillion seat to help earn some additional income for bikers, as and when they liked. By using the right technology to support this innovative idea, we launched Rapido in Bangalore in October 2015 and recently turned three.

Ever since, we’ve seen tremendous growth and success, nationally, in over 17 cities, across 10 states. The Rapido app has already hit the 1 Million mark early 2018 and is adding new users every day. Executing more than 1.5 Mn rides every month it is soon becoming the go-to taxi-service app for daily commuters in these cities.

By providing affordable and efficient intra-city transportation to users, Rapido is expanding at a faster pace than ever and with our growth, we are at the sweet threshold that every booming startup reaches, sooner or later, scalability and reliability in providing consistent service.

Rapido’s tech stack

We are revolutionising bike-taxi as a service and hence need to have a robust tech base to support our app and its users. Linking bikers aka ”Captains” to riders and helping them connect to Captains available as closest to their locations needs technology that can power and run as many requests as possible with low latency.

Rapido predominantly uses Node.js and Java. We use Microservice Architecture that enables us to experiment with more languages other than Java, like Python, Scala and Go in the language stack. Rapido also works with open source technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, NATS, Redis and Elastic search, etc

Business Challenge and the need for a Cloud Infrastructure Service  Provider

With a tremendous boom in user-base, mammoth growth rate and mighty acquisition of the Indian market, it was evident that Rapido’s choice of cloud infrastructure provider would be pivotal to its success. High Availability, low latency, ease and effectiveness of deployment, intuitive management capabilities, speed, security, monitoring, cost-effectiveness, flexibility in choice, developer friendliness, scalability and simplicity in billing were some of the key evaluation metrics for narrowing down on the choice of the infrastructure provider

With container orchestration capabilities offered by Kubernetes becoming a decisive piece in our scaling strategy, It was of paramount importance to us that the cloud provider would provide facilities to ease deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters

Enter DigitalOcean

Cloud infrastructure provider, DigitalOcean, has been the go-to place for developer-led businesses especially startups given its rich community and easy tutorials. It is through these tutorials that we at Rapido were first introduced to DigitalOcean and subsequently, to its services that would help us get the cloud boost, we had been looking for.

Given our rapid growth, Rapido-needed to scale fast and an agile cloud computing partner like DigitalOcean was just what we needed. The collaboration between us had begun early on and together we have seen four successful years of strategic cloud computing partnership.

We started with developing the Rapido app on the DigitalOcean platform. Given its innovative and user-friendly products, we soon decided to use DigitalOcean for production, as well. Rapido currently has its entire infrastructure hosted on DigitalOcean, which happens to be our go-to cloud service provider for both Development and Production environments.

Features that supported Rapido’s speedy growth

The pay-as-you-go and transparent pricing offered by DigitalOcean helps startups scale easily, without worrying about the cost angle to scaling their apps and expanding their business.

Rapido uses DigitalOcean’s Load Balancer, Snapshots, Floating IPs, and the Kubernetes Cluster the most.

Load Balancer helps us distribute the load among different services, thereby helping us scale our applications, and improve performance, availability, and security, across our infrastructure

We use DigitalOcean’s Snapshot and Backup features to store certain templates which can spin up each time a new Droplet (cloud server) is created This helps Rapido automate default configurations for each Droplet and save precious time and resource.

The Floating IP is yet another feature that we find useful among the various DigitalOcean offerings. Floating IPs enable developers to move IPs from one Droplet to another, in the same datacenter. This helps us maintain a highly available infrastructure and one that is protected from facing any failure/downtime scenarios.

The flexibility of features like Load Balancer and Floating IP and reliability of features like Snapshot and Backup, coupled with the simplicity of the Droplet, makes DigitalOcean Rapido’s preferred cloud computing partner.

Finally, Rapido’s need for a cloud platform that supports Kubernetes was also taken care of by DigitalOcean. The cloud platform made working on Kubernetes clusters not only an easy but also an enjoyable experience for the Rapido developers.

Having a datacenter in Bangalore was an added plus, as Rapido, too is headquartered in Bangalore. Having the datacenter nearby helps us reduce data replication issues and also aids in minimising latency delays, which in turn improves application performance.

Our favorite DigitalOcean feature happens to be the OneClickApps which helps us deploy pre-built apps with literally, just a click. Developers can skip the installation and configuration stages to go straight to deploying their code using DigitalOcean’s pre-built images that support Ruby on Rails, Docker, Node.js, and MongoDB, among others. The ability to plug in additional storage with just a click has introduced Rapido to a new world of seamless experience.

Their reliability and simplicity makes it the cloud service partner of our choice. The ease of automatic payment as per usage and the continuous support of the team has been a major plus in spelling the growth story at Rapido.

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