Carousell secures and scales their ecommerce marketplace with Cloudflare
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Asia
- Pacific
Country
- Singapore
- Australia
- Hong Kong
- Indonesia
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Taiwan
Product
- Cloudflare
Tech Stack
- Cloudflare
- Amazon CloudFront
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Cloud Security
Applicable Industries
- E-Commerce
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
About The Customer
Founded in 2012, Carousell is one of the largest C2C ecommerce marketplaces in Southeast Asia, with customers across Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, and the Philippines. Users can purchase and sell items from a variety of categories — cars, property, fashion, household appliances, assistive devices, electronics, and more — and post job listings or offer services across an equally expansive range of industries. Carousell chief architect Harshad Rotithor estimates that more than a quarter of Singapore’s entire population uses the platform, which boasts more than 250 million listings to date. Those figures are expanding as more users flock to the site, bringing a host of new performance challenges to overcome.
The Challenge
Carousell serves around 1 PB of images per month and utilizes artificial intelligence to create a frictionless user experience for anyone looking to buy or sell items on their platform. In order to meet intensive performance requirements for a rapidly expanding regional customer base, they need a cloud provider that can ensure uptime during high-traffic events and cache dynamic pages on an as-needed basis. These issues come into sharp focus during Carousell’s periodic “flash sales” — a recurring limited-time event when they partner with sellers to provide deep discounts for buyers. Just one of these flash sales can attract over 3x the amount of traffic Carousell typically sees. It isn’t an easy task, especially as the rapid influx of traffic during flash sales places a significant strain on the platform. Initially, Carousell turned to Amazon CloudFront to keep their site running smoothly, but soon found that they were not able to handle the site’s growing audience and performance needs.
The Solution
In 2016, Carousell switched to Cloudflare. With data centers in 200 cities and 90+ countries worldwide, Cloudflare helps Carousell cache their assets on the network edge, bringing content as close to end users as possible. This ensures that the site never experiences outages during high-visibility sales or loses customers due to slow page loads. Cloudflare also enables Carousell to cache dynamic pages for short durations, which allows them to easily handle a huge amount of traffic during flash sales and provide a seamless user experience. The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) leverages collective threat intelligence to identify and prevent malicious requests, empowering users to proactively defend against incoming attacks and ensure application availability. And it seamlessly integrates with bot mitigation and DDoS attack protection to shield sites from resource draining bots, DDoS threats, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other attacks.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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