HOW GRAB CATEGORIZES TENS OF MILLIONS OF USERS IN MILLISECONDS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Grab operates a Segmentation Platform to categorize users, drivers, and restaurants into segments for various purposes, such as experimentation, blacklisting, and marketing. This platform handles substantial workloads, with impressive performance metrics of up to 12,000 reads per second, 36,000 writes per second, and a low P99 latency of 40 milliseconds. It consists of two key subsystems: Segment Creation, powered by Apache Spark, and Segment Serving, supported by Go services and ScyllaDB for efficient data storage and retrieval.