Case Study: Carousell achieves 99.99% availability and scales to 80M listings with Google Cloud Platform

Carousell Running an online classifieds marketplace on GCP

Carousell is a mobile classifieds marketplace launched in 2012 that lets users list items in seconds and chat in-app to buy and sell. Rapid user growth across Southeast Asia and beyond outpaced its hosted infrastructure, leaving uptime under 90% and forcing the company to seek a more stable, scalable platform without ballooning its operations team.

Carousell migrated to Google Cloud Platform and adopted G Suite, moving core services in two weeks and using Compute Engine, Load Balancing, App Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub. The move boosted availability to about 99.99%, supported more than 80 million listings (≈500 million images) and 1 billion chats, kept system-reliability headcount at five instead of an estimated 30, and lowered cost per monthly active user through pay-for-use pricing.

Carousell

Jordan Dea-Mattson

Vice President of Engineering