1.
ScyllaDB at Strava
Phani Teja Nallamothu, Senior Cloud Engineer

2.
Phani Teja Nallamothu
■ Tech enthusiast with 10 years of experience in IT
■ Interests in SRE, DevOps, AI/MLOps, Big Data, AWS
■ Love hiking, cricket, poker and dogs

3.
■ Strava introduction
■ Architecture overview
■ ScyllaDB usage at Strava
■ Benefits of ScyllaDB
Presentation Agenda

4.
What is Strava?

5.
Subscription Platform at the Center of
Connected Fitness
Enable athletes to connect with their community & compete
■ Compatible with over 400 devices to share data with a larger athletic community
■ Part of every phase of athlete’s life - indoor, outdoor, sleep, training, recovery
■ Subscription features include but not limited to
■ Segments
■ Matched runs & rides
■ Performance metrics
■ Route discovery
■ HeatMaps, Local Legends and more

6.
Largest sports community in the world
■ 100 million athletes in more than 195 countries
■ Over 30 activity types ranging from hiking, running, biking, swimming etc.
■ Connect athletes to each other and help them find their personal best
■ Group challenges
■ Clubs
■ Leaderboards
People Keep People Active

7.
Architecture Overview

8.
Application Architecture Overview
AWS
EC2 Instances
Internet
Load
Balancer
(ALB)
Mesos Agents
Linkerd
Backen
d
Service
s
Backen
d
Service
s
Service
MySQL
(Aurora)
Redis/
Memcache
(Elasticache)
Zookeeper Cassandra
Backen
d
Service
s
Backen
d
Service
s
Service
Backen
d
Service
s
Backen
d
Service
s
Service
Kafka
(MSK)
Elastic
Search
(Amazon ES)
Blob storage
(S3)
CDN
(Cloudfront) Queues
(SQS)
ScyllaDB

9.
ScyllaDB Usage
at Strava

10.
Horton
Flexible scalar value store for activity data
■ Activity distance
■ Max/Avg Speed
■ Max/Avg Heart rate
■ BikeID
■ ShoeID etc.
Schema looks like

11.
Horton Query Types
■ Clustering column - athlete_id
■ Efficient access of all of an athletes activities on a single node
■ Single activity lookup
■ Get all values for an activity
■ Range lookup by time
■ Useful for aggregating metrics like distance, time, elevation across multiple activities

12.
Other Use Cases
■ Segments
■ Store athlete’s PRs on segments
■ Very High write volume
■ Neogeo
■ Store encoded map styles for static images
■ High read volume (Feed)
■ Decent write volume (once per activity)

13.
Benefits of ScyllaDB

14.
■ API Compatible with Apache Cassandra
■ High Throughput
■ Consistent low latency
■ No GC Pauses
■ High Availability
■ Fewer Nodes
■ Reduced Complexity
Benefits of ScyllaDB

15.
■ ScyllaDB Manager
■ Enterprise Support 24 x 7
■ Professional Services
Benefits of ScyllaDB Enterprise

16.
Thank You
Stay in Touch
Phani Teja Nallamothu
pnallamothu@strava.com
www.linkedin.com/in/phani-teja-nallamothu