Case Study: Yahoo achieves scalable, modern big data processing with Amazon Web Services

How Yahoo Advertising is using Amazon EMR to process add analytics at scale, accelerating its modernization journey

Yahoo Advertising’s contextual targeting team faced the challenge of processing and analyzing massive volumes of data to verify that ads reached the right audience at the right time, with data samples arriving in hundreds of gigabytes every five minutes. Instead of a simple lift-and-shift move, Yahoo modernized this environment with Amazon Web Services, using Amazon EMR along with services like Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, and Amazon MWAA.

With Amazon Web Services, Yahoo rebuilt its data pipelines on modern open-source frameworks such as Apache Spark and Apache Flink, while also improving workflow orchestration and storage on AWS. The results included faster upgrades that now take about one hour instead of lengthy, complex processes, greater independence for the team, and the ability to scale and resolve issues more quickly—boosting efficiency and innovation for millions of users.

Yahoo

Adesh D’Silva

Senior Software Engineer