The ability to quickly serve search results is essential for Yelp. Ranking performance has a significant impact on the time it takes to process a search request, and it’s crucial for fast ranking that we can quickly look up the data that’s fed into our machine learning models. Per-document map-like data is especially challenging in this regard, as traditional approaches often read and decode the full map only to look up a single value within that map later on. MapType is a custom Elasticsearch datatype that provides an optimized look-up approach for such data. Let’s start by discussing a concrete...

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In an ongoing effort to break down our monolithic applications into microservices here at Yelp, we’ve migrated several business flows to modern architecture using AWS Step Functions. Transactional ordering at Yelp covers a wide variety of verticals, including food (delivery/takeout orders), booking, home services, and many more. These orders are processed via Step Functions, where each is represented as an execution instance of the workflow, as shown below. Figure 1: Illustrative Step Functions Workflow for Transactions Orders Each step in the above workflow is an “activity,” and Yelp implements these activities as batch daemons, which interact with AWS Step Functions...

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Today we’re proud to introduce Bento, an open source framework for building modularized Android user interfaces, created here at Yelp. Over the past year, we’ve seen great developer productivity gains and product design flexibility from using Bento on our most critical screens. In this post we’ll explain a bit about how Bento works, why you might want to use it, and where we want to go next. What is Bento? We named this framework after the wonderfully compartmentalized Japanese lunch container. A Bento box is a container with dividers to separate different food items from each other. If you squint...

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In 2017, Yelp had over 40 Jira administrators to allow different teams across the organization to perform administrative tasks. With lots of admins came lots of changes, which lead to our Jira environment accumulating hundreds of orphaned workflows, screens, and schemes. To solve this problem, we built a scalable solution that empowers our engineers to create Jira projects themselves using code and source control – ensuring 100% standardization across all engineering projects and making Jira easier to manage, simpler to use, and better performing. This blog post will cover Yelp's use of Ansible to manage Jira server project creation, updates,...

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This year Yelp sponsored the second annual Tech Intersections conference in Oakland, CA. It was a great opportunity to celebrate womxn of color in tech and to come together and learn from each other’s successes, challenges, and experiences. The conference, which featured ALL womxn speakers and attendees, highlighted topics ranging from tech entrepreneurship to self-care and career skills. Kelly Greenia, Engineering Recruiter, with some Yelp Swag! Two members of Yelp’s Awesome Women in Engineering (AWE) group attended the conference and below are some of their takeaways. This past weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Tech Intersections conference at...

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Here at Yelp, we host a lot of servers in the cloud. In order to make our website more reliable—yet cost-efficient during periods of low utilization—we need to be able to autoscale clusters based on usage metrics. There are quite a few existing technologies for this purpose, but none of them really meet our needs of autoscaling extremely diverse workloads (microservices, machine learning jobs, etc.) at Yelp’s scale. In this post, we’ll describe our new in-house autoscaler called Clusterman (the “Cluster Manager”) and its magical ability to unify autoscaling resource requests for diverse workloads. We’ll also describe the Clusterman simulator,...

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The eleventh round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge ran throughout the first half of 2018 and we received many impressive, original, and fascinating submissions. As usual, we were struck by the quality of the entries: keep up the good work, folks! Today, we are proud to announce the grand prize winner of the $5,000 award: “Generalized Latent Variable Recovery for Generative Adversarial Networks” by Nicholas Egan, Jeffrey Zhang, and Kevin Shen (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science). The authors used a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) to create photo-realistic pictures of food...

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Here at Yelp we use Kafka extensively. In fact, we send billions of messages a day through our various clusters. Behind the scenes, Kafka uses Zookeeper for various distributed coordination tasks, such as deciding which Kafka broker is in charge of assigning partition leaders and storing metadata about the topics in its brokers. Kafka’s success within Yelp has also meant that our clusters have grown substantially from when they were first deployed. At the same time, our other heavy Zookeeper users (e.g., Smartstack and PaasTA) have increased in scale, putting more load on our shared Zookeeper clusters. To alleviate this situation, we...

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