Founded in 2019, Chilibeli is a Jakarta-based social commerce platform that connects farmers, suppliers, and consumers to bring fresh, quality products to every household at affordable prices. It is a group-buying network that facilitates online shopping for daily household needs such as farm products and groceries. Chilibeli’s initiative, ‘Mitra’ network, offers consumers the chance to become part-time agents who buy products in bulk and sell on to fellow consumers in their neighborhood at competitive prices. The network is rapidly expanding, and by early 2021, the platform acquired over 100K registered users across Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bandung.

Chilibeli was looking for a technology partner with expertise in cloud computing to build a sound technology foundation for its social commerce platform. It required a reliable, easy-to-use, and scalable cloud platform that supports rapid development and deployment.

With the rapid growth and increase in the number of suppliers and payment providers integrated with the platform, Chilibeli faced the growing risk of security threats. Being a startup, the company didn’t have a dedicated security team to assess and manage the potential security breach. It wanted to implement a smart security solution to get complete visibility and control of the cloud assets and free up its team from infrastructure management to focus more on the core application development.

Moreover, with mobility restrictions in force due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it wanted to enable the R&D team to work remotely on the feature release and debug management.

With a strong local presence and two data centers in Jakarta, Alibaba Cloud was the initial choice for Chilibeli. With Alibaba Cloud’s reliable and secure cloud computing services, Chilibeli accelerated its platform development process and enabled a remote working environment for its development team. Alibaba Cloud’s smart IaaS and PaaS services helped Chilibeli develop and deploy new capabilities without infrastructure management hassles. Besides, a wide range of services across compute, networking, and security from a single cloud service provider helped Chilibeli transition from the development phase to the production phase in a month.

Chilibeli developed the social commerce platform on Alibaba Cloud. It leveraged an array of cloud computing services from Alibaba Cloud to move from simple monolithic architecture to the production environment in a month. As the Chilibeli network grows, Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) helps store and backup massive data volumes in the cloud for improving processing capability while optimizing the storage cost. To overcome the remote working environment challenges, the social commerce platform employs ApsaraDB for Redis, an automated tool, to empower its development team to manage data shared across multiple processes and servers. Chilibeli also used Elastic IP Address (EIP) to flexibly manage public IP address resources and Server Load Balancer (SLB) to improve the platform's availability and fault tolerance capability.

Furthermore, to overcome security challenges and the unavailability of the dedicated in-house security team, Chilibeli deployed Alibaba Cloud’s Security Center to identify, track, and analyze the potential security threats across cloud assets. Besides, it leveraged Resource Access Management (RAM) service to manage access permissions for users and groups and used CloudMonitor to keep cloud assets health in check.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

Chilibeli is committed to empowering local communities across the emerging middle class in Indonesia by providing easy access to affordable products while creating livelihood. Collaboration with Alibaba Cloud strengthens the technology backbone of the Chilibeli network to easily scale, seamlessly connect every stakeholder and continually deliver value.