Mrsool Delivers Anything, Anywhere with AWS

2021

Mrsool is one of Saudi Arabia’s fastest growing startups, with the on-demand delivery app aiming to provide “a messenger on every corner of your city” to deliver anything, anywhere. Mrsool’s rise has been rapid since it launched in 2015. In 2019 alone, it reported almost a billion dollars in gross merchandise value (GMV) and more than four million users across the Middle East and North Africa.

Customers use Mrsool’s courier network for everything from picking up items from a shop and delivering food orders, through to couriering documents or even bringing gasoline to a driver who has run out of fuel.

A delivery request is placed on the Mrsool app, either from one of the listed restaurants or shops, or by creating a new custom order. Couriers can view details of an order and reviews of the customer and vice versa.

After a courier bids for and accepts an order, they can communicate easily and directly with the customer using the app’s interactive chat function to send voice notes, text comments, or images. The order is also tracked via the app’s integrated map.

Mrsool’s business grew exponentially during 2020 due to increased demand for home delivery during the pandemic and quarantine restrictions.

To support that growth, Mrsool needed an infrastructure that could scale easily and deliver high availability, reliable performance, and agility. At the same time, the company which has a strong startup culture wanted to be able to focus on innovation and growth, not managing its infrastructure. That’s why Mrsool went all-in with Amazon Web Services (AWS) from day one.

Mrsool uses AWS Managed Services to help grow its business without having to worry about infrastructure capacity. The managed services help to reduce the administrative and management burden on Mrsool staff by taking away the need to manage the various elements of the infrastructure that underpin the app. This means fewer people are needed: today, Mrsool has only two people in its infrastructure team.

Ayman Alsanad, founder and CEO at Mrsool, says: “With AWS, we don’t have to worry about managing infrastructure components and all of that stuff. We want to focus on our core business, and AWS offers a great opportunity to focus on building our application and delivering value to customers.”

Scalability was particularly important when orders placed through Mrsool spiked overnight to 600,000 during the pandemic.

Eqbal Quran, CTO at Mrsool, says: “We never had capacity issues and our services scaled perfectly. You can add more compute resources, move data around, and have peace of mind that AWS can handle that workload.”

Fundamentally, AWS allows Mrsool to focus on the important work of innovating, experimenting with new services, and growing its business instead of managing IT. 

“That’s the beauty of AWS—you don’t need a dedicated team to manage the infrastructure because it’s mostly managed services,” says Omar Bahareth, head of engineering at Mrsool. “AWS does 80 percent of the infrastructure work for you.”

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) virtual machines host all of Mrsool’s applications, including the interactive chat experience for customers and couriers. All production traffic is now served from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) after a recent migration from AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Mrsool can easily upscale or downsize its databases and view key metrics with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Amazon Aurora, which handles database management and mission-critical data storage of order and user information. With just a couple of clicks, Mrsool’s engineering staff can access a dashboard to see what is happening and quickly diagnose any problems.

Through the analytics capabilities in Amazon Redshift, the management team and external partners are also able to access a variety of reports and dashboards to view business intelligence and key performance metrics in real time. 

Amazon ElastiCache is used to provision caching infrastructure and provide automated backups and monitoring, and the tracking of orders is done through a combination of Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda.

“With AWS, it’s all done for you,” says Mostafa Dahab, head of infrastructure at Mrsool. “You click a few buttons or run a script and it will all be provisioned for you with high availability, security, and redundancy all configured for you. You just have to choose what flavor you want, and the rest is taken care of.”

This approach also helped Mrsool to successfully launch in Bahrain and Egypt in 2019 and will support further ambitious plans for new services and international expansion in 2022.