Stadia Maps: Using ScyllaDB to Serve Maps in Milliseconds

Stadia Maps was founded to provide aesthetically pleasing, fast-rendering maps at a lower cost than existing services, using open mapping programs and OpenStreetMap data. Initially reliant on CockroachDB, they switched to ScyllaDB due to CockroachDB's latency issues and inability to adjust consistency settings to their needs, which caused delays and errors in map rendering. ScyllaDB's eventually consistent global distribution capabilities allowed Stadia Maps to meet their end-to-end latency requirement of 250 ms, significantly improving performance by reducing response times to around 500 ms for p99. This switch facilitated efficient data handling and reduced server resource demands by balancing CPU, RAM, and storage needs between map rendering engines and ScyllaDB. The migration to ScyllaDB, which took just a month, has allowed Stadia Maps to optimize their systems continually, ensuring swift and reliable map delivery worldwide.