Ruangguru I/O 2021

How we build education superapps with effective

engineering

Speaker: Alvin Tamie

Thursday, Feb 4th 2021

Our Tech Team Challenges

Our current tech team size is ~160 people (Tech + Data).

We are serving our services across countries Indonesia, Vietnam and

Thailand.

We have distributed team across Jakarta, Bandung, Jogja and Malang.

We have rapid development more than 10 different education product services.

Wide spectrum of technological challenges from providing many media formats

of learnings: pre-recorded learnings, live teaching, gamification (learning through
games), recommendations, various questions type and more.
Our Approaches

Our Engineering OKR #2:

Objective: Accelerate the development team speed

● Reduce Development Overhead “Toil”, kind of work or task that tends to be manual,
repetitive, automatable, tactical, and devoid of long-term value.

In Ruangguru, we do have dedicated teams (Infra, Productivity, SEIT, Data Engineering, Data
Werehouse, Code Quality) to develop tools for our team members to keep reducing development
overhead.

"If a human operator needs to touch your system during normal operations, you have a bug. The definition of normal
changes as your systems grow." Carla Geisser, Google SRE

Reference: https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
Removing Toils

We will discuss our team platforms that helps us

to be productive!
Backend Engineering
Backend Engineer

Service-B

HTTP

Users
Morse

Data
Mesh
GQL Stitcher
GRPC

HTTP Morse

Microservice Service-A
Orchestrator
Productivity: Our In-house Tools & Platform

Documentation Preparation / Utility / Platform

Translation Platform: Platform to manage multiple

RG-Postman: Generating API Docs in postman autmatically
language / localization (including error response)
RG-Scheduler: Configurable scheduling service
RG-Stitcher: Tools to remove interdependency service

ROGU
(CLI to Run All of
Our
Deploy
Tools/Platforms) Coding Phase

Newton: Kubernetes abstraction Contract Framework - Code Generator (No Need to

RG-OSC: Engineers can change db schema Code)
independently, seamless + safe BE: Morse Boilerplate (Combining HTTP - GRPC in
Kong Gateway Generator: Engineers can change kong single handler, Declarative Error, Declarative Cache, etc.
config independently FE, IOS, Android: Network Transport Layer

Testing Phase

Goku: Vegeta orchestrator. Load Test Platform.

Automation Device Farm (Grace): Spawn Virtual Android Device On Demand with
Automation Test Worker
She-Mock: Front end conotract mock test.,Enabling FE testing their service without
waiting BE done their works
Productivity: Contract Framework

Declarative Authentication
Middleware

Will generated to kong config

Automatic Response Caching

HTTP + GRPC Handler

Declarative Errors (with Auto

Localization Language)

Automatically Validate Request

Param
Productivity: Why our engineers productive?

● Our engineers should be able to do it their-self

○ Deploying service. (rogu deploy + newton)
○ Configure service resources & envar. (rogu scaling &
rogu config)
○ Load Test (rogu loadtest + goku). And many more!
● Our engineers shouldn’t work what not necessary (DRY)
○ Boilerplate: Contract Code Generator (rogu gen-proto
+ protoc-gen-rg + morse + contract descriptor)
○ Write multiple job code (microservice orchestrator)
○ Create API Documentation (postman integration)
● We care about standardization and conventions
○ We do platform meeting every month
Frontend Engineering

Will discuss further in next session! Frontend Engineering

Mobile Engineering

Mobile Engineering

● Modularity is in our DNA.

● Single codebase to serve millions of
students from Indonesia, Vietnam
and Thailand
● Feature Flagging.
● State-of-the-art translation platform.
● Bi-weekly release cadence.
Infrastructure Engineering
Infrastructure Engineering

● Focus on developing tools and

automation.
● Caps the operational work to a
maximum of 40% from daily task.
● Runs Multiple GKE clusters.
● Manage thousands of VMs.
● Monitoring hundreds of thousands
of containers.
● Serving traffics of millions of
students across Indonesia,
Vietnam, and Thailand.
● All done by just 4 Infra engineers
Infrastructure Engineering

Declarative Gateway Config Predictive Workload Scaling Tool

Centralized Alert Configs

And more...
Content Delivery Engineering
Content Delivery

● Deliver contents such as

Videos, Images, Interactive
games, live streaming and
Conferencing
● Developed player for Video and
Interactive game.
● Build video on demand
transcoding pipeline.
● In house Webrtc infrastructure
solution for conferencing.
Content Delivery Pipeline
Game Tooling

Game Template Game Packaging

Provide Collection of Handle assets

reusable template to packaging and optimize
support Fast Development its compression

Rapid and Scalable

- Fast onboarding for Game Layouter

- Reusable Component
- Runtime Delivery
Software Engineering In Test
Software Engineering In Test

● Hopper, automated test

framework on top of
robotframework.
● Grace, highly scalable test
runner orchestrated Mobile
Emulators, Browsers and API
tests.
● In-house CLI interface to
interact will all testing
ecosystem.
● Consistently maintained a >
95% of test success rate for
all our testing coverage, keep
our hands clean from flaky
tests.
Data Science Team
Data Science Team

Data science: product (deliver value to user),

business (reduce cost and improve profit), or
automation (precision, resource allocation).

Product Highlights:
● Roboguru
● Smart Recommendation
● Knowledge Graph
● TV Rating Prediction
● Review Clustering
● Audio Noise Filtering
● etc.
Data Science Team

Data science in RG have opportunity to solve the

problem end-to-end. Starting from business problem
definition, formalize problem, develop model, designing the
system, until deploying the model on Kubernetes cluster.

We use MLFlow for repeatable experiments. We are also

working on using Seldon for our Model Serving to achieve
model deployment productivity, easy to version and ab test,
with help from Data Eng.
Data Engineering Team
Data Engineering Team

Data engineering: data pipeline, ML serving

infrastructure, analytics tooling. Done just by 2
eng supporting the whole company.

● Realtime and Batch data pipeline

architecture for analytics & data
warehouse
● ETL config friendly for non-engineers
● AB Test platform (using Flagr), support
quick experimentation and post analysis
● Data mesh, enable each product engineer
to provide real time data
Data Warehouse Team
Data Warehouse Team

Data Warehouse: Reusable, clean and easy to

use data. Small team supporting various business
x countries possible due to toolings we develop.

● Dimensional Modeling for ease of analysis,

previously it was so many tables duplicated
● Reusable Customer summary data,
segmentation can be done quickly and easily
● ETL config generator using chrome extension
to improve analytics productivity
● Configurable Sales Agent Assignment rules,
20x faster for ops to create assignment
Data Warehouse Team

Example of ETL configuration in YAML.

● The tool will automatically resolve
dependencies so that ETL creator
doesn’t have to define dependencies
● Description on schema will automatically
go to data catalog
● Owner on the schema will get alerted
when things happen
● Checker SQL as unit test for the ETL
Our Cultures
Our Cultures (Principles)
1. Psychological Safety
Anybody can raise an idea, concerns, issues. We valued your
opinions
No Blaming, fix the problem instead.
Retrospective and iterate
2. Engineering Excellence
Always have a mindset to achieve best quality you can deliver.
Technology choices should strive to be "optimal" while avoid
over-engineering.
Be Technology agnostic, always open to new technology, deeply
understand pro and cons (ROI) and always try to choose best
ROI solutions when making technical decisions.
3. Devops as a Culture
Obsessed with developer experience and improve it
Understand process at any level, iterate and improve it.
Don't block yourself, always find way to make your impact.
If your work depended on others you can help to fix it.
Don't only know your dependencies, help others who
needed.
4. Being Nice is Nice
Give people the benefit of the doubt and always assume
positive intent.
Take the time to understand why they made a decision
before making assumptions.
There's always a nice way to handle a situation, and we
strive for that
Our Cultures (What we do to enable our principles)

1 Public Design Challenge:

All teams encourage to have
public technical discussions for
new/project. Anybody could join
if they interested to learn & give
feedbacks.
Our Cultures (What we do to enable our principles)

Clear separation between planning and execution phase!

2 Product Development
Workflows S1 - S6 (WIP) We try to not rushed and do the planning phase well. This
is crucial to enabling our Principles 1 & 2.
Our Cultures (What we do to enable our principles)

3
Contributor Day:
Once every quarter, 2 days
allocated time for Contributor
Day.
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