Dacsee: Disrupting the ride-hailing business with Google Kubernetes Engine
About Dacsee
Launched in 2017, Dacsee is a community-driven ride-hailing app that aims to solve everyday transportation challenges. Following its mantra, "go global, run local," the Malaysian company has plans to use cloud technology to scale regionally in the near future.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usAbout Matrix Connexion
Matrix Connexion is a premier Google Cloud partner in Southeast Asia that helps companies embark on Google Cloud solutions.
With Google Cloud as the technology platform that runs all of its applications, Dacsee is prepared to scale up and enter new markets quickly and efficiently.
Google Cloud results
- Enables scalability and quick entry to new markets with cloud technology
- Increases number of rollouts and sprints with quicker deployments
- Reduces time spent on infrastructure management with Stackdriver Monitoring
- Reduces downtime to zero with high service availability
- Enables 40% more drivers and doubles the amount of bookings made in less time than before
Helped gain 143K users in 12 months
Aiming to disrupt the transportation industry, Dacsee is a Malaysian ride-hailing mobile application that is designed to foster a fair and equal community of drivers and passengers. The app, set up like a social platform, sets it apart from its competitors, since many ride-hailing apps often prioritize passengers over drivers. "We want to create a healthy and safe environment for both our drivers and passengers and build connections that go beyond a transactional driver-passenger relationship," says Aaron Hong, Product Lead at Dacsee.
To incentivize users on both sides, passengers who refer new drivers are rewarded. Each time a referred driver picks up a passenger, a percentage of that ride payment goes to the passenger who referred the driver to Dacsee. "The idea behind this is to provide equal opportunity for both drivers and passengers to be part of a community that supports one another," says Hong.
With different elements to the platform, it’s important to have visibility across the various functions and to maintain a healthy infrastructure for carrying them out. "Google Cloud centralizes all the business functions such as monitoring, management, scaling, upgrades, and deployment, which allows us to easily work from one platform. This has resulted in quicker and more productive work across the company," he adds.
"Google Cloud centralizes all the business functions such as monitoring, management, scaling, upgrades, and deployment, which allows us to easily work from one platform. This has resulted in quicker and more productive work across the company."
—Aaron Hong, Product Lead, DacseeThe sky's the limit with Google Cloud
Only two years since its launch, Dacsee already has plans to enter new markets such as Thailand and Indonesia. "Making the decision to deploy Google Cloud from the very beginning has allowed us to operate at scale and position our services in an accessible way, with low latency across multiple regions globally. This has made it easy to enter new markets quickly and efficiently," says Hong.
He explains that before Google Cloud, it was difficult for Dacsee to envision an application that scales globally, as having to manually deploy and connect different infrastructures would be a huge challenge. "We aspire to revolutionize the public mobility space one country at a time, and to do that, we need a reliable infrastructure partner that allows us to run without looking back. With that in mind, we have found Google Cloud to be best positioned to help us achieve our goals."
With ride hailing being such a competitive space, Dacsee needs to move quickly if it wants to remain ahead of its competitors. "Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) has allowed us to do our deployments efficiently and productively, which has resulted in a very high number of rollouts and sprints," says Hong.
"Making the decision to deploy Google Cloud from the very beginning has allowed us to operate at scale and position our services in an accessible way, with low latency across multiple regions globally. This has made it easy to enter new markets quickly and efficiently."
—Aaron Hong, Product Lead, DacseeRemoving the burden of infrastructure management
As a company that is dynamically growing and making ongoing improvements to its app, a lot of time used to be spent managing infrastructure. "With Google Cloud, we no longer spend much time on infrastructure management, deployment, and processes, as most of it is taken care of. This has saved us the equivalent of one to two personnels’ time, which is a huge cost saving," says Hong. He adds that the company can reposition its resources that were traditionally spent on infrastructure to focus on other areas within the software development life cycle. “We’re now able to concentrate our resources on our product, and that includes enabling our backend engineers to fully focus on features.”
Dacsee also relies on Matrix Connexion, a premier Google Cloud partner in Southeast Asia, to help monitor its cloud environment. This is done using Stackdriver Monitoring that effectively keeps an eye on its platform environment. "We have enabled Stackdriver to help ensure that we catch any problems before it happens. Stackdriver can also tell if a database uses too much RAM or if a disk is filling up faster than it's supposed to be," says Wilson Chuah, Chief Technology Officer at Matrix Connexion.
With visibility and tracking in the form of graphs, Wilson shares that he is able to quickly identify any abnormalities in the environment. "The graphs help us visualize the utilization and do capacity planning. It also informs us when something is not functioning according to design. Unlike a traditional environment, we don't have to build and manage a logging pipeline with Stackdriver."
The ability of Google Cloud to identify the root cause almost immediately when a situation arises has also been beneficial for Dacsee. "We’ve saved as much as 80% of time that would otherwise be spent troubleshooting and trying to understand the root cause of a problem. This is quite a significant chunk of time that translates into valuable resources to the team," says Hong.
"In the early days, sometimes we had to shut the app down for maintenance. With Google Kubernetes Engine, we no longer worry about downtime, thanks to a service availability of close to 100%. This has also helped us save costs, as we no longer need a full-time support team on standby."
—Aaron Hong, Product Lead, DacseePeace of mind with zero downtime
As a consumer application, Dacsee is available to customers 24/7. As such, it can’t afford to face any downtime. "In the early days, sometimes we had to shut the app down for maintenance. With Google Kubernetes Engine, we no longer worry about downtime, thanks to a service availability of close to 100%. This has also helped us save costs, as we no longer need a full-time support team on standby," says Hong.
He explains that because new updates can also cause disruption to the system due to unforeseen circumstances, GKE allows rollback of updates, which helps ensure that the system is first put back to its normal state.
Dacsee already has plans to include a continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline on its platform moving forward. "At the end of the day, the foundation of everything we do goes back to the idea of going global and running local, and I believe that we will be able to scale to new heights with Google Cloud," says Hong.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Dacsee
Launched in 2017, Dacsee is a community-driven ride-hailing app that aims to solve everyday transportation challenges. Following its mantra, "go global, run local," the Malaysian company has plans to use cloud technology to scale regionally in the near future.
About Matrix Connexion
Matrix Connexion is a premier Google Cloud partner in Southeast Asia that helps companies embark on Google Cloud solutions.