Case Study: Yammer achieves highly available, low-latency notifications with Riak KV (Basho)

Yammer Powers User Notifications With Riak Kv® Enterprise Software

Yammer, the enterprise social networking service used by tens of thousands of organizations, needed a highly available, low-latency data store to power a new Notifications feature. The Notifications workload caused duplicate-data and stability problems when run on Postgres (replication and crash issues) and required a Dynamo-style, eventually-consistent key-value store. Yammer evaluated Dynamo-inspired projects and selected Riak KV® Enterprise Software from Riak for its mature tooling, commercial support, and operational ease.

Riak was deployed as a distributed NoSQL backbone for Notifications (handling 2+ terabytes of data), with Yammer reporting a production cluster up in about 15 minutes. The Riak-based solution delivered flat, very low latency, eliminated the single point of failure concerns, simplified capacity planning and SLAs, and has operated without alerts or root-cause incidents since deployment—providing a stable, highly available Notifications module.

Yammer

Coda Hale

Infrastructure Architect