Grab picks Amazon Web Services as preferred cloud provider to accelerate innovation across SEA
05 Dec 2024
Southeast Asia’s largest superapp Grab has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, to drive innovation and growth across its operations in eight countries.
The partnership is expected to enable Grab to reduce operational costs, enhance efficiency, and scale securely, with AWS’ infrastructure supporting the demands of its vast ecosystem.
Grab, which serves 41.9 million monthly transacting users and 13 million driver and merchant partners, processes more than 100 transactions per second across its platform.
“At Grab, our strategy for growth is anchored on constant innovation to outserve the needs of our users and partners,” Grab chief technology officer Suthen Thomas Paradatheth said in a statement on Thursday.
“This requires rapid experimentation, while ensuring security and stability, along with the ability to fully harness the potential of the latest tech like GenAI (generative artificial intelligence). We are pleased to extend our partnership with AWS as our preferred cloud partner to continue to support us on this journey,” he added.
Grab has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where AWS is now its preferred cloud provider.
With a long-standing relationship since 2012, AWS has played a central role in Grab’s evolution from a ride-hailing startup to a superapp encompassing logistics, food delivery, and financial services.
According to Grab, AWS’ infrastructure allows it to dynamically allocate resources to match fluctuations in demand, particularly during peak periods like holiday seasons, while scaling down during off-peak times to save costs.
Beyond operational stability, Grab has adopted AWS’ Graviton2 processors, enabling it to migrate over 400 back-end services from traditional virtual servers to the processors for greater cost and energy efficiency.
“Cost optimisation is one of the three pillars of our technology strategy,” Grab head of engineering for technical infrastructure Mohan Krishnan said during a virtual media briefing. “The others are scaling securely and swiftly, and harnessing data and AI to improve the quality of experiences we offer our customers.”
Grab has also leveraged AWS’ toolset for its AI initiatives. Grab’s machine learning model platform, Catwalk, is built on AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and supports over 1,000 AI models in production.
These models underpin core functions such as pricing, route optimisation, and fraud detection, while also powering customer-facing features like tailored food recommendations and AI-generated menu descriptions for merchants.
“Grab’s AI journey is about experimentation, building, and delivering models that enhance their ecosystem. Catwalk, built on EKS, has allowed them to deploy AI capabilities across use cases such as logistics, pricing, and fraud detection, which are critical to their business,” said AWS’ Asean managing director of commercial enterprise, digital and SMB, Gunish Chawla.
While AWS is the preferred cloud provider, Mohad said Grab will continue to maintain relationships with other cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“Running multi-cloud takes effort,” he said. “But we feel that this strategy of still leveraging multiple clouds has the benefit of actually being able to use the best capabilities from different cloud providers.”
“And what we have been trying to pursue at Grab is trying to maximise both in terms of simplifying our multi-cloud setup by picking AWS as our preferred choice — so the bulk of our workloads go there — but in cases where using different clouds has some advantages, we leverage that too,” Mohad added.
Source: The Edge Malaysia
