Kartu Prakerja is a training fee assistance and incentive program for workers, laborers, job seekers, and micro- and small-business owners who are affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and in need of increased competence. This program, launched in March 2019, is aimed at helping job seekers stay relevant by acquiring new skills or upgrading existing ones.

Within one year, the program managed to get more than 150 training partners onboard with more than 6,000 courses available. The top training courses include digital marketing, food and beverages, information technologies, office automation and entrepreneurship. By end of March, 2021, there are over 59 million registered users and 6.7 million users who have completed the trainings.

During the initial phase of the program, the team had to immediately come up with a product that is able to scale despite having limited resources. Millions of people had anticipated for this government program, and many new users registered within a short period of time.

On top of the issue of scalability, the team at Kartu Prakerja was also looking to secure the application as they needed to have multiple links to other internal and government bodies. This was a problem due to the limited time frame; they had to look for a platform that is very mature and is ready to rapidly launch their application.

The team at Kartu Prakerja needed to build a scalable and secure application. They needed to make sense of the massive amounts of data, which required a sophisticated platform that is able to analyze the information that they have, helping them to better serve the community.

Despite the challenging requirements and tight time frame, the team at Kartu Prakerja were able to launch the app on time with the help of Alibaba Cloud. With a local data center in Indonesia since early 2018, Alibaba Cloud's familiarity with the region was also well suited for the team's needs. Alibaba Cloud's experienced team also provided close support to Kartu Prakerja, helping them to quickly build the platform without facing any serious issues.

Application Architecture
Kartu Prakerja is using multiple products and services from Alibaba Cloud to support their application:
- From the initial point, Prakerja uses Alibaba Cloud CDN and Server Load Balancer (SLB) to eventually continue the requests to the application server;
- The server that is being served initially by Kong cluster servers for API Gateway purposes, is quickly being relayed to the core application servers, which leverages Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes (ACK) and Auto Scaling to be able to produce efficient code and scale according to market needs;
- Kartu Prakerja also uses multiple network products, from VPC and security groups to manage and secure their network, NAT Gateway to let internal applications to access the internet, and VPN Gateway to allow connectivity and redundancy to external endpoint;
- One of the things that we can highlight is also the usage of Express Connect as the physical link connectivity to Dukcapil (Population and Civil Registration Agency). This allows them to establish secure and stable connectivity while enjoying low latency connectivity to external applications and secure the approval.

Data Architecture
Prakerja is utilizing multiple data storage services in Alibaba Cloud such as:
- Object Storage Service (OSS) is being used to store their flat file documents. TBs of data is being stored there securely and durably;
- ELK stack is being used for one-data perspective for Kartu Prakerja business. Unstructured big data is being stored and queried in this stack;
- On the database level, both PostgreSQL and MySQL are being used for different purposes and applications, while some of the frequently access data are cached in Redis.
- For data warehouse perspective, Kartu Prakerja is using Alibaba Cloud's Data Transmission Service (DTS) to copy the data from multiple sources to AnalyticDB PostgreSQL (ADB). This has helped to improve their data analysis per query from more than 15 minutes to less than 1 minute.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

Alibaba Cloud and Kartu Prakerja are working closely together to modernize more and more applications such as for big data and AI. They are also looking at adopting other database technologies, such as PolarDB, to leverage automatic read/write splitting and its ability to scale swiftly, making application management smoother for them.

Security is also a major consideration, which is why Kartu Prakerja are considering using Alibaba Cloud's Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Anti-DDoS to launch a regional scrubbing center.