Case Study: Yahoo! Japan reduces datacenter footprint and boosts performance with ScyllaDB

Yahoo! Japan Saves Time and Space with Scylla

Yahoo! Japan, which serves over 50 billion unique visitors and 100+ billion page views per day across search, advertising and commerce services, faced an exploding infrastructure footprint — by 2018 it was running 200 Cassandra clusters with 4,100 nodes — and the operational pain of Java GC, low resource utilization, and heavy maintenance. To reduce servers, nodes and datacenter space they evaluated alternatives and chose ScyllaDB’s Scylla NoSQL database for higher performance and smaller clusters.

ScyllaDB’s solution delivered dramatically higher throughput and efficiency: tests showed Scylla scaling to about 30K ops/sec versus Cassandra’s ~11K, and Scylla handled 100 threads at the same 99th‑percentile latency Cassandra delivered with 8 threads. CPU utilization rose from ~50% on Cassandra to near 100% on Scylla, enabling Yahoo! Japan to consolidate onto fewer, more powerful nodes, cut maintenance overhead and move toward a smaller datacenter footprint.

Yahoo! Japan

Murukesh Mohanan

DevOps Engineer