Microservices and APIs for Active-Active

The Challenge

In the summer of 2020, Pandora’s main data center in San Jose was struck by lightning, resulting in a loss of 60% of the servers and triggering a failover scenario to the Disaster Recovery (DR) data center. This exposed severe limitations in the underlying monolith application, and the associated hosted server configuration. Pandora needed to design and implement new microservices, and conduct an accelerated migration to a fully active-active solution.

‍What We Did

• Worked in close collaboration with the Pandora team to map out the microservices and design the APIs
• Extracted the business logic of various key services from the monolith and created the new microservices.
• Updated all calls in the code to use the new APIs/microservices.
• Updated the new microservices to use the storage and caching libraries for the relevant storage databases, which were core to the Active-Active solutions. 

‍The Result

SPAN enabled Pandora to deliver new APIs and microservices in a number of areas, including Listeners and Profile, that are essential for all Pandora customers. These new services are resilient to network and data centre failures and allow for load balancing, and a more robust overall customer experience.

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