It is hard to believe that Rappi began as a small food delivery company from Colombia, in a few short years it achieved supper app status, reaching 30 million users in 9 countries, 6000 employees, receiving around $2 billion in investments along the way. The extremely quick growth pushed the limits on all fronts, and as a data driven company with mind-boggling amounts of data, the pressure on the data platform was extremely high.
Rappi needed technology that could scale with seemingly no limits. It needed a platform that required very few specialists to manage and that could ingest huge flows of data from thousands of sources all over the continent. This data needed to reach an empower thousands of users of the company all across those 9 countries, and also reach external providers, partners and investors. in a secure manner. All of this had to be built very quickly and while the business was fully operational, with thousand of internal users and millions of end-users depending on the data.
Rappi took the phrase, “build the plane while flying” very seriously.
Many combinations of technologies were tested, most of them failing in some way or another to meet our requirements. In fact many providers were frustrated by our “unreasonable” requirements.
That’s when Rappi gave the Modern Data Stack a chance. Many in the company were skeptical, as even the biggest names in technology and the major cloud providers could not handle our data needs. When we tested Fivetran and Snowflake, sandwiched between thousands of sources and a few Business Intelligence Platform, it worked as a charm; meeting all our requirements from that day forward. Stabilizing the data operations at Rappi and exceeding our expectations under exponential growth and the highest demands.
With providers that quickly supported our specific needs, and with a predictible cost management. The Modern Data Stack allowed every team in the company to work based on data, and develop solutions that drove the business. New uses for the Modern Data Stack platform implemented on Rappi are being developed up to this day, and no doubt it will continue on the future.
The experience of implementing the Modern Data Stack at Rappi informed my philosophy on how to implement cutting-edge data strategies that drive business results and how to do it to the highest standards even under hyper-growth conditions at scale.
