Paxel Achieves Nationwide Same-Day Delivery with AWS

In Indonesia, the logistics industry has been dominated by a few big players with deep pockets and armies of employees. Paxel entered the market in January 2018, with its first package delivered in May of that year. CTO Erick Soedjasa describes the startup as “a tech company moving in the logistics space.” Since its launch, Paxel has turned to technology to improve operational efficiency. Instead of large, centralized warehouses, the startup has set up smart lockers in key locations across the country. It offers door-to-door delivery of packages within 8–10 hours in cities across Indonesia, with offices in Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya.

Paxel chose to host its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) because the platform provided the foundation to jump-start its business with low initial costs and automatically scale as the business grows. Paxel’s customer-facing mobile app, package-tracking app for couriers, and backend dashboards with analysis functions were all built on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Elastic Load Balancing. Couriers, also known as Heroes, take a picture of the customer receiving the package and request the person’s signature via the Paxel app as proof of delivery, and these images are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Engineers use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon ElastiCache for faster content delivery, which in turn improves users’ mobile app experience.

The startup also uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to fully manage its existing Kubernetes environment. With Amazon EKS, Paxel can easily deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications, so engineers can focus on continuously improving its Kubernetes environment and daily operations. Soedjasa explains, “Everything we use in AWS is carefully considered before implementation to ensure we can sustain it. Our investment in AWS is more forward-looking in terms of additional services that we can deploy as we grow.”

From a management perspective, Soedjasa appreciates the ability to securely delegate tasks to teams in different locations. Paxel’s engineers are often based in cities apart from its management, so the company has set up specific role-based usage and deployment parameters using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). “It’s very easy to manage chains of employees with AWS IAM instead of managing each individual,” Soedjasa says.

Paxel also values the detailed breakdown of infrastructure spending and cost projections when the team makes a change or adds a new feature. “The ability to control costs with AWS means we never get a bill shock. If we notice high cost projections, we can immediately think of ways to lower them,” Soedjasa says. At its launch, Paxel delivered just 20 packages a day, using the smallest computing instances available to minimize server costs. Now, it is delivering over 10,000 packages daily. The business is growing by 30–50 percent each month and has notched a corresponding 60 percent increase in AWS server consumption.

The startup has joined shopping site Bukalapak.com in a logistics partnership and is in talks for further integration with big ecommerce players. Currently, Paxel is the first company in Indonesia offering same-day, inter-city delivery, with an on-time delivery SLA of 95 percent. The company has also maintained a 99.99 percent SLA for uptime on its AWS infrastructure since launching. Soedjasa says, “The core features of AWS are its scalability and ability to prototype easily. We can maintain a high SLA while still having the flexibility to experiment and add new services.”

The diagram below illustrates the AWS infrastructure at Paxel:

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