The Hidden Hurdles to Scaling an e-Wallet that Serves 200 Million Users in Indonesia
by Johanan Devanesan
DANA stands at the forefront of the rapidly evolving digital landscape of Indonesia, revolutionising the way people conduct financial transactions. Founded in 2018, DANA has swiftly become one of the nation’s leading e-wallet and payment services, boasting an impressive user base approaching 200 million in 2024.
With a vision to create a cashless society in Southeast Asia’s largest economy and to empower millions with innovative financial services, as the ubiquitous digital payments service in Indonesia, DANA embarked on a journey of growth and transformation.
However, as the company’s user base skyrocketed and transaction volumes soared, it became evident that a robust and scalable technological foundation was crucial to sustain this meteoric rise.
This is the remarkable growth story of DANA, and the pivotal role played by its partnership with OceanBase, a distributed relational database developed by Ant Group, in overcoming technological challenges, and achieving unparalleled success in its home market of Indonesia.
The Rise of DANA
According to DANA’s leadership, its journey began with a vision to create a cashless society in Indonesia, by providing secure, reliable, and innovative financial services to the masses. Norman Sasono, DANA’s Chief Technology Officer, emphasised the company’s goal, stating,
“We want to create a cashless society, along with the financial lifestyle” to be inherent in increasingly digitalised Indonesia, the largest potential market in Southeast Asia.
Norman highlighted how the e-wallet is about 60 million users short of covering the entire population of cellular device users in Indonesia, demonstrating the widespread demand for its scalable digital financial services.
In 2024, its services cover a whole range including money transfers, credit card binding, balance top ups, and being the first digital wallet to enable QR payments by integrating with the national Quick Response Code Indonesia Standard (QRIS) network, amongst many more.
As the company gained traction, it experienced an exponential surge in user adoption and transaction volumes for its payment and embedded financial options. Zikry Zakiyulfuadi, VP of Technical Operations & Engineering at DANA, proclaimed how DANA’s user base has grown from around 150 million in late 2023 to approximately 180 million in 2024, a significant portion of Indonesia’s 275 million population.
Tackling the Challenges of Scaling a User-Heavy Platform
With such a range of services, DANA recorded a staggering billions of transactions every year, solidifying its position among the top e-wallet players in the country. Norman pointed out how having the range of features, but also the technology infrastructure to support it, is what made DANA able to gain a firm foothold in Indonesia.
However, in early 2018, with its rapid growth in online transactions and merchant partnerships, DANA soon encountered technology scalability and sustainability hurdles, which its database management system for various functions, such as transaction management, payment processing, billing, membership and marketing, was unable to keep up effectively at the time. Zikry revealed that their initial setup using MySQL-like databases struggled to cope with the escalating transaction volumes during peak events.
As DANA’s rapid user growth escalated, its system capacity “hit the ceiling multiple times”, prompting DANA to seek a more robust solution. Maintaining system stability, reliable performance, and operational efficiency amidst fluctuating and unpredictable workloads became a daunting task.
Moreover, DANA faced high risks of data loss and extended downtime, along with complexities in transitioning from on-premises to a hybrid cloud infrastructure.
OceanBase: Leveraging the Data Management Tech from Payments Leader Alipay
To overcome these challenges, DANA turned to OceanBase, a cutting-edge distributed database solution. Ant Group has been developing OceanBase since 2010 to address the exponential growth of Alipay’s users and transaction volumes, which even reached millions of transactions per second during the annual Double Eleven Shopping Festival in China.
Charlie Yang, Chief Technology Officer of OceanBase, explained that creating an in-house solution brought Alipay the flexibility to customise and optimise the database to its specific requirements — and to leverage the technologies and expertise that made Alipay one of the world’s most successful e-wallet, there was huge interests for its scalable database solution which is now serving more than 1,000 brands globally, including DANA.
“Reliability and high availability were paramount to avoid downtime and data loss, which is vital in financial services. Performance was also a key focus, aiming for low-latency and high-throughput to deliver seamless user experiences,” he said.
Anticipating the increasing traffic volumes that they would be facing while already hitting the capacity limits with their previous MySQL database, DANA upgraded to OceanBase’s on-premise solution in 2018, before further migrating to a hybrid cloud setup.
Since then, DANA’s user base has soared from 20 million to nearly 200 million, a testament to the scalability and performance offered by OceanBase.
“Additionally, OceanBase’s ability to start with small environments and effortlessly scale up to handle thousands of transactions per second supports DANA’s business growth seamlessly,” stated Zikry, adding that this scalability, combined with OceanBase’s disaster recovery and 24/7 global remote technical support, ensures DANA can maintain high performance and reliability, even as their transaction volumes soar.
Surpassing the Global Benchmark for Transaction Processing
OceanBase’s distributed architecture enabled DANA to scale seamlessly, even during peak performance periods, Zikry explained,
“The setup is distributed database, and this is different from the traditional setup in the traditional banks or corporate, which the setup is active-passive. But in OceanBase, we are active-active.”
This meant that instead of the main server handling the full workload while a backup server only activates in the event of a failure, active-active high availability clusters distribute workloads evenly across all nodes, ensuring optimal load balancing.
This database design guaranteed technology resilience, granting DANA a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 8 seconds while capable of handling thousands of transactions per second. This was a high industry benchmark for a market like Indonesia — one that OceanBase cultivated over 11 years of supporting the Double Eleven Shopping Festival, handling peak transaction rates of 61 million queries per second for Alipay.
OceanBase also once surpassed the world record on the TPC-C transaction processing benchmark and won multiple recognitions from top analysts such as Forrester, IDC and Gartner, demonstrating unparalleled capabilities to support the mission-critical workloads of other organisations facing similar scalability obstacles.
By engaging OceanBase’s distributed database capabilities, DANA could maintain high availability and minimise downtime, providing uninterrupted services to its ballooning user base.
Zero Downtime, Zero Data Loss
One of the most significant benefits of adopting OceanBase was the achievement of three crucial zeros: zero downtime, zero data loss, and zero data inconsistency, DANA’s VP of Technical Operations & Engineering Zikry elaborated.
“There will be no data loss since every node has the same data. The synchronisation is in sub-milliseconds, it’s very fast.”
In the meantime, after deploying OceanBase, in 2020 DANA witnessed an overall business system availability of over 99.99%.
This level of stability and data integrity was essential for building trust among users and merchants alike. Norman added that with DANA’s online transactions and merchant partnerships growing exponentially each year, a scalable and sustainable solution database solution was crucial to ensuring smooth growth and meeting the growing demands of its clientele.
OceanBase’s high availability features delivered consistent response times, regardless of workload fluctuations, ensuring they can meet their ambitious growth and performance targets seamlessly.
Seamless Migration to Hybrid Cloud Setup
As DANA embarked on its journey from on-premise to a hybrid cloud architecture in 2019, OceanBase proved to be a vital technology enabler once again.
DANA CTO Norman acknowledged that the knowledge and expertise gained from incorporating OceanBase’s distributed database capabilities were essential to their own learning curve on hybrid cloud, saying, “It was only through our partnership with OceanBase that we decided to put in place a modern, unified database to secure our technology resilience and business growth.”
Norman noted that based on their experience, being 100% on-premise or 100% in the public cloud was not optimal for DANA’s capabilities. He found that it was more economical to run onsite for regular workloads, but there would be requirements to shift workloads to the cloud when experiencing high traffic spikes.
By migrating to a hybrid cloud setup in 2019, OceanBase facilitated a seamless transition that allowed DANA the “elastic scalability” to flexibly move instances to the public cloud, especially when the need arises to support the system’s high availability for users.
It also functioned to provide redundancies in case one of three data replica centres is overwhelmed, with two backups still available, based on OceanBase’s 3-replica architecture. With this setup in place, DANA experienced zero database failure and zero data loss the following year in 2020, along with an overall business system availability of over 99.99%.
OceanBase Migration Service (OMS) migrated hundreds of instances from the MySQL database to OceanBase on the public cloud.
Partnership with a Commitment to Customer Care
Acknowledging how the technical strengths of OceanBase had supported DANA’s seamless deployment and migration process. Zikry also praised the partnership for OceanBase’s unrivaled round-the-clock and attentive technical support.
“They always send their engineer to the war room to join and discuss with us to solve the problem as soon as possible. That kind of commitment is quite rare,” he commented.
Norman agreed on the importance of the OceanBase relationship, stating how among all of DANA’s vendors, database is a core aspect for a rapidly-expanding platform:
“Their support has been exemplary for us to reach this level of nearly 200 million users in such a short period of time, like less than six years.”
Scalable Success Through Collaboration
DANA’s success story is a testament to the power of innovation, partnerships, and technology in driving digital transformation. By joining forces with OceanBase, DANA overcame its scalability and performance challenges, catapulting itself to the forefront of Indonesia’s e-wallet and payment market.
The distributed architecture, high availability, and seamless scalability provided by OceanBase were instrumental in DANA’s ability to handle the exponential growth in users and transactions.
As DANA continues to shape the future of digital payments in Indonesia, its partnership with OceanBase serves as a shining example of how strategic collaborations can unlock new horizons of success in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
