Case Study: Yahoo! Japan achieves massive scale — serving 40M+ users and 180K requests/sec with VMware Tanzu

How Yahoo Japan serves more than 40 million users with help from Pivotal, Spring, and SRE

Yahoo Japan, which reaches more than 40 million users and sees over 93 million unique browsers a day, faced the challenges of operating massive scale with a 2,000+ engineering org: multi‑cluster role management, routine multi‑foundation configuration, rising log traffic, an explosion of pipelines, frequent developer errors, and 24/7 multi‑cluster monitoring needs. Maintaining velocity and reliability as demand and complexity grew—10,000+ apps, 40,000+ instances, and ~180,000 requests/sec—was the core business challenge.

The company standardized on Pivotal Platform (Pivotal Application Service), embraced Buildpacks and a Java/Node.js shift, and organized complementary CRE and SRE teams to drive developer productivity and platform reliability. Combined with automation, improved tooling, monitoring/SLOs, and education, these changes enabled Yahoo Japan to scale to 16 (soon 24) PaaS clusters managed by a 25‑person platform team, absorb a ~10x app growth with minimal headcount increase, and deliver faster, more reliable services.

Yahoo! Japan