Ola Cabs on Their First Two Years of Using ScyllaDB in Production

Ola Cabs, a leading ride-hailing service in India, adopted ScyllaDB as a database solution to meet the demands of its real-time business, which often experiences quick spikes in demand due to various factors like weather and special events. Initially using Cassandra, Ola Cabs sought a database that could provide high throughput, low latency, and high availability, without the latency issues associated with the JVM runtime. ScyllaDB, written in C++, offered a promising alternative with its close-to-the-hardware approach and assured development of important features. Over a two-year period, Ola Cabs successfully integrated ScyllaDB into its ecosystem, using it for both write and read operations, and achieving improved performance by utilizing NVMe disks and configuring appropriate replication factors across multiple availability zones. The company found that using ScyllaDB without a caching layer simplified their architecture and reduced costs, while native metrics monitoring with Prometheus facilitated effective debugging and performance optimization. Ola Cabs continues to engage with ScyllaDB's community and anticipates future enhancements like secondary indexes and user-defined types to further support their mission-critical operations.