Founded in 2009, Tokopedia is a Jakarta-based unicorn operating as one of the leading technology players in Indonesia.

With a marketplace platform serving 5.9 million merchants and 90 million active users every month, the business is only starting to scratch the surface given national e-commerce penetration stands at five per cent.

To handle large-scale events such as Ramadan Ekstra, the first-ever online shopping festival in Indonesia, Herman Widjaja - Senior Vice President of Engineering - leveraged Google Cloud.

The platform enabled Tokopedia to provide uninterrupted service to shoppers and merchants, scaling up to attract more than 332 million visits and 73 million visitors during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Transactions on 25 May alone equalled the total transactions from Tokopedia’s first five years of operations.

Running high-profile online events at scale such as Ramadan Ekstra helps the business acquire large numbers of new users at once. This then allows the provider to take share of an ‘e-tailing’ market in Indonesia forecast to grow from $5 billion in 2017 to $40 billion in 2022.

Previously however, the unicorn’s large-scale interactive product Tokopedia Play could only support 55,000 concurrent users. The application was rebuilt as a microservice on Google Kubernetes Engine in five weeks and is now able to support 1.5 million concurrent users.

Tokopedia manages and secures the microservices with Istio service mesh and configures global load balancing on GKE for resiliency.

According to Widjaja, the uniqueness of the innovation at Tokopedia centres on high-performance availability and delivering high-quality customer experience at scale.