The challenge
Yahoo! Japan Corporation provides uninterrupted search, email, shopping, auctions, and services to about 85 million monthly active users. With about 100 services available for users, the company has to be able to function 24 hours a day all year round. For the database team at Yahoo! Japan, providing uninterrupted services to its users relies on a solid foundation, and that includes its database deployments. If services are not available — or if they are performing poorly — it affects customer experience and revenues. MySQL is the database of choice for many of these services, and Master High Availability (MHA) provides the ability to automate failover quickly from one instance to another. However, this does require knowledge and skills around MHA to implement and run over time. With multiple database instances to support and demanding availability targets, the Yahoo! Japan database team decided to look for additional support and expertise to complement their existing developer and infrastructure teams. With this support the team could improve availability for the online services that it provides to users.
The solution
After researching relevant providers, the database team chose Percona’s support services and XtraDB Cluster solution. The Yahoo! Japan database team chose Percona because to serve their users 24 hours a day 7 days a week, the team can get optimal high availability and advanced technical support that can quickly and efficiently resolve their database issues. Following the initial success, Yahoo! Japan decided to expand their support coverage to make it even easier for the Yahoo! developer team to manage their infrastructure. This would improve developer experience for Yahoo! Japan while also maintaining availability levels. Yahoo! Japan developed a private database as a service (DBaaS) platform in-house by combining Percona’s open source and highly available database XtraDB Cluster and cloud computing infrastructure project OpenStack.
This combination of XtraDB Cluster and OpenStack helps Yahoo! Japan update application components faster and more efficiently by using immutable infrastructure components to assemble applications or services. Rather than having to update each instance any time an application required a change or update, which would stop the service and then require a restart once the implementation was updated, the Yahoo! team can carry out their changes without stopping their application services. This delivers a better developer experience while also achieving the company’s availability and resiliency goals. By implementing Percona XtraDB Cluster, Yahoo! Japan is able to eliminate unplanned database downtime and update applications at any time without scheduling planned downtime. The team also has fully automated data recovery services built in, so services can be restarted with minimal potential for data loss.
Engaging with Percona
The Yahoo! Japan team relies on Percona as an indispensable part of their database support. Thanks to Percona’s advanced technical support, coupled with the provision of software patches, the Yahoo! Japan team is able to resolve database problems early and prevent critical system issues before they occur. Yahoo! combines OpenStack with Percona XtraDB Cluster to support its development team in deploying services more efficiently while also achieving its goals around infrastructure availability and resiliency.
