Case Study: Yelp achieves real-time, seconds-level analytics and scalable data warehousing with Amazon Web Services (Amazon Redshift & Amazon EMR)

Yelp - Customer Case Study

Yelp, the local business review platform, experienced rapid global and mobile-driven growth—millions of monthly users and over 100 million reviews—which strained its legacy data warehouse and MapReduce workflows. The company faced long query times (hours), resource contention, and slow ad- and product-analytics for multiple internal teams that needed fast, independent access to large log and advertising datasets.

Yelp moved its analytics to AWS, using Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, and S3, with MRJob for ETL and an open-source orchestrator called Mycroft to automate data loads. Teams spin up dedicated Redshift/EMR clusters on demand, eliminating contention and speeding work flows; query performance dropped from hours to seconds, enabling scalable, near-real-time analytics that improve ads, product decisions, and developer productivity.

Yelp

Jason Fennell

Vice President of Engineering