Yota is a mobile operator that extensively implements innovations in its work. The company was the first to launch LTE onto the Russian market, offer unlimited 4G broadband for 78 regions, and use drones for SIM card delivery.
In 2017, Yota realized that the company needed to speed up the backend response to mobile app requests. Opening the application could take 5–6 seconds, which was noticeable to the user, so Yota services left a negative impression.
At that time, the company used a service-oriented architecture with synchronous requests that heavily affected the system performance. The microservice architecture was then starting to gain popularity. As part of its implementation, Yota technical experts started looking for an in-memory solution that would help them organize the cache. In the end, they settled on Tarantool.
Behind the cache in Yota, there is an extensive IT
landscape with roughly 200 services. The services are
divided into IT products, each in its own isolated
infrastructure. For example, the IT product responsible for
customer data and the IT product responsible for subscriber
notifications work independently. Domains are configured
in the cache, so there is no need to send a GET request to a product every time to collect information. The Yota team also added branching logic for domain invalidation. When
a backend event occurs—for example, the subscription
time runs out—the cache wrapper intercepts the event and
resets this particular subscriber’s domain.
Today, Yota has the following services implemented on Tarantool
technologies.
The primary Tarantool-based service in Yota is the Profile
Aggregation Service—a personalized cache that speeds up customer data handling. The service
collects and caches profile data from adjoining systems.
It invalidates the data after receiving external signals. Adding a new
profile only requires a configuration.
The domain-oriented Enterprise Persistent Storage holds data structures created by IT products. The service
handles saving, updating, reading, and deleting data.
For example, it enables the user to create a payment template
in the mobile application.
This is the service that aggregates and encrypts subscriber data. When data changes, services send asynchronous requests to invalidate their cache data. Requests are processed asynchronously, and data is sharded in the backend to increase access speed.
This is a domain-driven persistent data storage providing a CRUD interface for reading, writing, modifying, and deleting data that requires fast access. In particular, the services use it to store temporary data during process execution.
The Semaphore Service stores information about blocked actions in the
system. The service is actively used for designing product logic
and asynchronous interactions.
The interactive directory was migrated to Tarantool. It stores directories of client numbers ported to Yota
as well as region codes. It is synchronized with
the Central Database of ported numbers and updates the data every
day. The directory quickly provides information to the mobile
app, website, and backend.
The product catalog was also migrated to Tarantool. Previously,
the configuration required a lot of effort and
developer contribution; now an analyst creates a YAML file
with the catalog configuration. The new architecture allowed
creating a flexible Yota constructor where a customer can choose
the number of minutes and gigabytes in a package. With the legacy architecture, this would
be technically impossible. Yota's service catalog structure
is defined by YAML.
Frontends Auth Storage Service (FASS) is an authorization
service that manages subscriber tokens.
Tarantool-based Yota services can safely process cache read requests in the amount of 3,000 TPS. Due to the changes in architecture over the past few years, the speed of modification has increased, and it has become easier and faster to change services. Before, a full release with analytics, development, and testing would take weeks. Now it takes three days at most, including testing, which isn’t necessary for ordinary tasks.
Access time in Yota services on Tarantool
Number of load testing read requests that Tarantool processes
TTM for a release with a configured product catalog
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