From On-Premises to Cloud: Yelp's Journey

For many companies, running their own data centers can be an unsustainable situation over the long-term. For Yelp, this was exactly the scenario that played out before they made the shift to the cloud.

In an interview with Jason Fennell, SVP of engineering at Yelp, he explained that when they needed new machines, it would take a few months to order and set them up. This led to bottlenecks, which would have been easily solved by leveraging the cloud. The company's operations team was dedicated to setting up new machines, but this process was not efficient.

Yelp's situation was classic - a growing business limited by long lead times required to procure and get new hardware online. It was clear that the company needed to transform from running a huge monolithic application on-premises to one built on microservices running in the cloud.

The conversation about shifting to a microservices architecture began in 2012, and it wasn't an overnight process. The majority of Yelp's data was processed in a massive Python repository that was growing all the time. Fennell emphasized that this transformation didn't happen willy-nilly; it required careful planning and execution.

As the tech world had changed dramatically since Yelp launched in 2004, the company recognized the need to transform its underlying technology to a more modern approach. Running their own data centers might not be the most efficient way to run a business that was scaling rapidly. By 2013, Yelp was a 9-year-old company built on internal systems.

In conclusion, Yelp's journey from on-premises to cloud is a testament to the importance of adapting to changing technology landscapes. The shift allowed them to overcome bottlenecks and become more efficient in their operations, ultimately enabling them to continue scaling rapidly.

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