Co-founded by PT. Akasanet Bumi Nusantara (ABN) and Kongko Digital, YOGRT is a location-based social app that enables its 7 million users to find interesting topics around them and connect with each other through fun games and quizzes. Founded in May 2014 in Jakarta, ABN currently operates Social Networking, Mobile Games, and also Live Content and is a pioneer of Indonesia’s rapidly growing digital industry among mobile applications and gaming. Kongko Digital’s vision is to consistently develop innovative products for millennials by millennials and learn from the latest trends, mobile technology and human behaviors to understand what users really want and need and come up with unique solutions for that market.

As YOGRT’s application became more popular, the amount of traffic and user requests started to increase rapidly. In order for the platform to provide external users with stable and scalable long-time services, as well as ease of operation and maintenance for the internal DevOps team, it was important for YOGRT to select a cost-effective and stable cloud service that could offer timely on-demand support.

YOGRT considered numerous cloud service providers during the early development cycle but the stability of their service failed to meet their expectations and, on many occasions, they were unable to receive after-sales support to address their questions and technical issues. YOGRT was eventually recommended to test the Alibaba Cloud platform, which immediately impressed the team according to YOGRT’s Technical Director, Felix. “We were really impressed by their quality even though they are relatively new to the market. Alibaba Cloud offers comprehensive solutions to tackle our scalability problem, while maintains a relatively low-cost base for us.”

YOGRT is now reaping the rewards of choosing to run its social network platform on the Alibaba Cloud platform. The investment has enabled the company to maintain a lean team and to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance. “We can deploy our team members on more strategic, revenue-generating projects rather than configuring servers and undertaking backup and maintenance activities.” Alibaba Cloud has also provided a platform to enable the company to expand into more countries in Southeast Asia, where users tend to access the Internet exclusively through mobile devices. “By using Alibaba Cloud, we can bring new environments up as fast as we need to in order to support growth. Alibaba Cloud is crucial to our success,” explains Felix.

To ensure a smooth deployment on a new cloud platform, YOGRT relied on the support from Alibaba Cloud’s technical team to set up their new architecture. “Throughout the initial migration as well as the subsequent deployment of new services on Alibaba Cloud, we received timely advice and technical support to help us get more familiar with their cloud product features and to follow best practices.” YOGRT now run their platform with high stability on Alibaba Cloud, taking advantage of hundreds of Elastic Compute Services (ECS) instances to support their entire system of micro-services. Server Load Balancer and Auto Scaling are utilized by YOGRT to support the system's elastic scalability. The company also leverages Object Storage Service (OSS) to store their massive amount of user-content generated files on the cloud and they accelerate content distribution on Alibaba Cloud CDN to deliver an optimal user experience for end-users.

“Alibaba Cloud has really convinced us not only with the stability of the services, but also the ongoing support with their dedication to ensure a smooth growth journey for our business.”