How Rapido transformed its engineering to serve 10 million+ customers

In a bold attempt to address the last-mile connectivity, a group of passionate people came together to built Rapido — which eventually disrupted the way people travel intra-city. What started to be a quest to make lives easier for people turned out to be the solution for the ever-growing intracity traffic problem that has been bogging down people across the country. All this in a fast, economical and safe approach.

However, to make a dent in the mobility space, Rapido has employed cutting-edge state-of-the-art technology right from the get-go.

Yet to keep up with the growing number of users spread over 95 cities across India and an exponentially increasing number of rides, Rapido has had to constantly keep a check on its technology powering the robust platform.

To address this situation, the company had to adopt the best practices of technology and keep up with the fast-moving technology ecosystem.

In this series of articles, we will explore how Rapido went to the drawing board to rethink its strategy to build at scale. We begin with an overview of the existing problems and the brainstorming that the team did to achieve the spectacular results. In the following articles, we will see how the team painstakingly implemented the new processes and migrated to new processes without affecting the business.

The need for transformation

Speaking about the pace of technology concerning the economy, Klaus Schwab, founder, and chairman of the World Economic Forum said,

“In the new world it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish”

Keeping this ideology in mind, Rapido has always been evolving its processes and offerings to be the best in the mobility space.

While the goal was to evolve the platform to the highest standards, the key factor that influenced this change was being able to serve the increasing number of rides, which the company was expecting to hit a million rides per day. This meant not only scaling the platform but also managing the stability and the security of the platform.

However, to reach this standard, the company realized that there were some existing problems internally that needed to be addressed. These included:

Automation: The earlier setting involved focus only on the development team. Only activities around development would get automated, specifically testing. None of the other activities especially ops activities used to get automated. The complexities involved in deployments indicated the need of automation for DevOps processes.

Visibility: The lack of visibility into the process of deployment meant increased chances of bugs and crashes, which could directly affect the customer and their user experience. This also meant inefficient action in case of server downtime or other failures. Moreover, this was a huge concern when scaling to meet unexpected user demand.

Internal clarity: With each team working in silos to complete its task, which led to broken systems due to lack of precise communication. Moreover, hand-offs and management was a challenge due to the distributed processes.

Security: Catering to thousands of users daily, security was always a priority for Rapido. However, a reactive approach due to the frequent updates coming from development teams led to misalignment with security hygiene.

The new process

Once the problems were identified, Rapido started taking measures to remediate the issues and build a truly world-class infrastructure and put processes in place that would stand the test of time.

Discover

The first step on this journey was to truly understand the organizational maturity. Introspecting processes like defining business requirements and outcomes, team collaborations, existing processes and tools for building, testing, deploying and managing code.

With that understanding in place, the team set goals and expectations from the change in the process. This included improving service quality, delivery predictability, reducing disruptions, response time, risk while building organizational health and capability.

Prioritize

The next major step was to get a leadership commitment. Defining and evaluating core processes and their business impact helps prioritize how to get started on the transformation journey. This also means budgeting for technology, tools, and infrastructure. But most importantly, getting all the teams on board and weaving the transformation into the cultural fabric of the company.

Build

When it came to the implementation, this involved setting up a core transformation team that would define the strategy. This meant revamping the entire CI/CD pipeline process.

For the CI process, everything from the code development to review was restructured. The build process was streamlined with version control tools, code merging and build status. The focus was increased on automated testing to test and determine performance. In terms of packaging, there was the implementation of the artifact repository and staging support.

Similarly, for the CD pipeline, there was a focus on the change management, release approval process and even the release automation. Another area of improvement was the infrastructure automation. Given that our app, like any other service provider in the mobility space, would see fluctuations in the usage. The automated infrastructure helped us solve this problem without ever having to worry again.

Just to be on a safer side and continuously alert, we also setup up monitoring alerts that would give us notifications on successful deployments and alerts in situations like server downtime.

Analyze

Once the implementation was completed with minimum effects on the users, the company started making note of the changes visible in terms of efficiency and scale. Some of the key things that stood out include more stable releases, reduced downtime, fewer bugs, and quick fixes. But the most important one was the increased team flexibility and agility which resulted in happier, more engaged teams. However, based on the continuous feedback available, the processes are still further being fine-tuned to achieve near perfection.

—

This is the first part of an on-going series that explores the transformational journey at Rapido Labs. In the next parts, we will see how we re-engineered our architecture, migrated to the services to scale our platform to cater to 10 million customers and the business impact it resulted in.

Also, we are always looking out for passionate people to join our Engineering team in Bangalore. Check out the link for open roles: https://bit.ly/2V08LNc