PrestoMall, formerly known as 11street Malaysia, is the largest homegrown online marketplace in the country of Malaysia. The PrestoMall marketplace provides a wide range of offerings for online shoppers, everything from women’s and men’s apparel, home electronics, and smart gadgets, all the way to home groceries, e-vouchers, and travel deals. The platform has both a web-based portal and smart phone app, and accepts various payment methods, including PrestoMall’s very own PrestoPay system. PrestoMall’s platform offers several unique savings bundles to shoppers, and prides itself in offering both local brands and several international brands, including some popular names from Korea, Japan, and China.

Over the past several years, PrestoMall has continued to see steady growth in its online users, with a registered growth of over 250% between the 2015 and 2018 fiscal years. At the same time, PrestoMall was feeling the pressure of increased competition, and PrestoMall’s previous IT infrastructure was very much inadequate to meet its requirements for continued expansion. Therefore, to stay competitive and enter into a new phase of growth, the company required an all-new cloud computing architecture, one that offered the necessary elasticity and scalability for future growth while still maintaining good cost efficiency. The previous infrastructural system that PrestoMall had used was a bottleneck to their growth, not meant to meet the demands of elastic growth and also had several associated licensing fees, which made optimizing operations nearly impossible for the company.

Alibaba Cloud has the necessary cloud computing services to support even the most demanding of e-commerce industry scenarios. Its products and services have been proven time and time again, most notably by withstanding the huge traffic spikes seen during Double 11, the world’s largest annual online shopping promotion. Alibaba Cloud’s products and services are also reasonably priced, offering a good cost-to-performance ratio. Among other products and services, Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for PolarDB proved to be the most enticing solution for PrestoMall. PolarDB provides improvements in terms of system performance and resilience while also being highly flexible and available at a reasonable price. The elasticity, scalability, and high availability that PolarDB can offer are precisely the capabilities that PrestoMall needs to bring its systems to the next phase of growth and also ensure that, in the case of any potential hardware failures, PestoMall can quickly restore its systems, keeping its services online and ready for its enthusiastic Malaysian shoppers.

In order to be able to migrate to Alibaba Cloud in a relatively short window of time, PrestoMall used several of Alibaba Cloud specialized cloud migration services, including its advanced database and application migration services. Among other products, PrestoMall migrated its systems to ApsaraDB for PolarDB. PolarDB is a cloud-native relational database that is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. PolarDB is capable of handling extremely high numbers of requests within a short time, and therefore could easily support the demands seen to PrestoMall’s systems as a major e-commerce platform in Malaysia. Besides implementing PolarDB, PrestoMall also integrated Data Transmission Service (DTS) into their systems. This service helped to support data migration and synchronization between PrestoMall’s data engines. With the new infrastructural solution provided by Alibaba Cloud, PrestoMall’s systems are capable of processing millions of queries per second, supporting up to 100 terabytes of data, while still maintaining a high level of security and system reliability.

By migrating its systems to Alibaba Cloud, PrestoMall now has an infrastructural solution that provides a much higher level of security, reliability, and availability. The more efficient systems of Alibaba Cloud have also helped PrestoMall achieved over a 40% decrease in IT spending. All of the relevant teams at PrestoMall were very impressed with Alibaba Cloud’s commitment and dedication through the migration process, and are very satisfied with their new infrastructural solution. The chief technology officer of PrestoMall wrote in a personal statement that, as a company, they look forward to taking their collaboration with Alibaba Cloud to the next level in the near future.