Yahoo! Japan! and ! Line! to! merge! systems! into! massive! private! cloud!

LY Corporation, the Korean web giant that combines Yahoo! Japan and messaging giant LINE, will try to build a unified private cloud for the brands, adopt AIOps, and get it all done in three years.

LINE and Yahoo Japan merged in 2021 to create a web giant that is a major force in e-commerce and messaging across Asia.

As explained in a post from last Friday, LY Corporation “built and operates an internal private cloud to provide the infrastructure and platforms our engineers need to develop services” and calls that platform “Flava.”

LINE and Yahoo Japan, however, retain their own tools.

“Because these platforms don’t yet provide a unified “cloud experience,” developers often have to learn separate ways to handle things like permission management, logging and monitoring, metering and billing, APIs and CLIs, UIs, approvals, and multi-region/availability zone (AZ) capabilities, platform by platform,” wrote Young Hee Park, a cloud service lead at LY Corp.

LY Corp has therefore decided to build “shared foundations” that mean all the platforms its developers need to develop services will be delivered from an internal private cloud, with a consistent UX. We call this effort “Flavaization” of platforms.

Park said the company has adopted the term “Flavaization” to describe this effort and hopes to complete the “major” work on the project in one or two years.

It’s not going to be an easy job.

“For example, we used to spend 1-2 months physically building secure environments,” he wrote. “In the current Flava security environment, resources can be provisioned in minutes, but accessing those servers can still require roughly 10 separate workflows, such as creating VDI accounts or setting up Box folders for data exchange. Because these steps involve approvals, the end-to-end lead time can still be as long as two months.”

He also lamented the fact that adding stronger access controls, such as virtual private cloud access control lists (ACLs), can add latency that slows LINE’s messaging app, its flagship product. “Requests to improve VPC ACL processing performance are something we take very seriously,” he wrote.

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Another challenge for this project is that LY Corp’s users rely on the company’s services to store images.

“Most of this data is stored for a long time and rarely deleted,” Park wrote. “In other words, even if service traffic stays flat, the amount of user-generated multimedia that must be stored continues to grow. From a service perspective, we also need better ways to present and manage that data for users. From a cloud perspective, we need storage that is cost-effective while still offering reasonable access times.”

LY Corp therefore “must invest in multiple storage technologies that match different stages of the data lifecycle” and balance cost, throughput, latency, searchability, compression, deduplication, and encryption considerations.

AIOps for a future cloud

Flavaization won’t end with solving the above problems. Park said LY Corp also hopes its efforts will mean its cloud is AI-enabled in two to three years and offered the following hypothetical set of requirements as an example of its aspirations:

Good luck with that all, LY Corp.

Park thinks this is all doable.

“The future of cloud isn’t limited to Silicon Valley,” he wrote. “If we allow ourselves to dream and then work to make those dreams real, we can build something remarkable here as well. Flava will continue exploring new technologies, envisioning a better cloud world, and executing steadily toward it.” ®