ARM, Mesos and Docker: Migrating Yammer Infrastructure to Azure

All things Docker seem to be the defining slogan for Yammer these days. And what other way to run Docker at scale than Mesos?

Acquired by Microsoft in 2012, Yammer moved into Microsoft owned Datacenters in 2014 with an in-house datacenter automation platform fraught with problems and restrictions.

Yammer's microservice architecture required something better suited; Azure.

Azure was evaluated early 2013 for it's Linux capabilities but was ultimately rejected due to performance requirements Azure wasn't able to provide at the time.

Along comes 2015 and a new initiative to migrate Yammer to Azure. The key to get it working?

ARM, Mesos & Docker

This talk will focus on two core points of the implementation run at Yammer: Docker & Security

Everything has to run inside Docker. From Zookeeper to the Mesos agents and even the executors. Dedication, mixed with some despair, eventually resulted in the platform for production today.

Security is the second biggest piece to honor the commitment made to Yammer customers as part of the Office365 suite. The path to provide a good solution to security aspects like compartmentalization, trust bootstrap, access control and transport encryption proved a balancing act between customer commitment and developer friendliness.

In the end Mesos helped us deliver Docker's promise of Build, Ship, Run as the foundation of environments Yammer can trust to run from Dev all the way to Production at scale and anywhere on the planet.

About the SpeakersKyle GordonSoftware Engineer 2, Yammer / Microsoft

I have been an engineer on the operations team for Yammer for almost 3 years. Currently I am in the process of creating a stable environment to migrate Yammer to Azure. We are primarily a micro service company and are an ideal fit to live on a mesos architectured environment. We’ve just completed the initial buildout and have successfully migrated a few of our services. I am a first time speaker.

Tobias HaagSenior Software Engineer, Yammer / Microsoft

4 years at Yammer from Junior to Senior Software Engineer at Yammer / Microsoft. Since late 2013 part of the Infrastructure team with focus on Datacenter automation and software lifecycle support. As of mid 2015 leading developer on Azure migration effort with focus on Docker and Mesos.