Case Study: Wikia achieves federated data access and rapid cloud scalability with Qubole

Wikia Provides Federated Access To Data And Business Critical Intelligence To Its Workforce

Wikia, a digital media company serving over 190 million monthly visitors across 360,000+ fan communities, faced a rapid-scale big data challenge as user activity and unstructured data grew exponentially. Its on‑premises Cloudera Hadoop deployment required significant hardware investments, tied up scarce data engineers in systems administration, and failed to provide federated access for technical and non‑technical users to get timely insights from data already backed up in S3.

Wikia migrated its analytics workloads to Qubole on AWS, completing the move in a few months and eliminating platform management overhead. Qubole’s automated, on‑demand scaling, cloud optimizations and shared Hive metastore enabled federated access to business intelligence across the workforce, faster capacity growth, improved analytics efficiency by co‑locating compute with S3 storage, and removed versioning and maintenance burdens.

Wikia

Wade Warren

SVP Global Engineering and Tech Ops