The resulting system eliminates the need for in-house system development, leading to a marked reduction in labor and cost
Meeting the demands of modern business
Since its establishment in 1996, Yahoo Japan Corporation has brought an array of innovative internet services to market. It’s core mission: “to solve problems for people and society with information technology". The tech giant has seen considerable success: as of 2018, the company offered more than 100 different services, being accessed by over 47 million people every month.
Historically, Yahoo Japan built and operated virtual servers in the IaaS environment. But new business demands have seen the company pivoting increasingly toward Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
"In order to meet the demands of a rapidly changing business environment, we need to develop services fast,” tells Tsutomu Ibi of the company’s Technology Group System Headquarters. “As such, we are working on the development infrastructure in the direction of providing a serverless platform.”
A natural evolution for an internet giant
After an extensive review process, Yahoo Japan selected Citrix ADM and Citrix ADC as an OpenStack LBaaS integration platform to build and operate its new CaaS environment. “Because of the PaaS environment, which pioneered ahead of the CaaS environment, we adopted Citrix ADC,” tells Tsutomu. “The in-line load balance performance was sufficient and there were no issues during operation. There were also additional advantages of not having to relearn the setup and development of CaaS.”
The new system began operation in August 2018, and Yahoo Japan has since continued to refine and improve its performance, for example by fine-tuning Citrix ADM and Citrix ADC to respond quickly to rapid changes in server demands.
“It was extremely helpful to have Citrix members quickly respond to our requests, from PoC to post-operation,” tells Yuta Kinoshita, also of Yahoo Japan’s Technology Group System Headquarters.
Into the future
Since rollout, Yahoo Japan has not only reduced the man-hours needed for development and operation, but the stability of its system has also improved considerably, tells Kinoshita. Yet the greatest advantage, says Ibi, has been the ability to divert the extra resources created to other value-adding tasks like network design and research and development.
Looking to the future, Yahoo Japan aims to further increase its operational efficiency with centralised management of multiple environments with Citrix ADM. As CaaS becomes more mainstream, “we expect functions will be separated, shifting to micro-services moved by containers,” tells Kinoshita, “resulting in yet more stability and operational ease.”
