Wrangling Customer UsageData with Hadoop

Clearwire – Thursday, June 27th

Carmen Hall – IT Director

Mathew Johnson – Sr. IT Manager

Starting With…

• …a little ingenuITy!

ingenuITy Day @ Clearwire

• Opportunity for everyone in IT to innovate and present new and even crazy ideas

• One of those crazy ideas was from Roger Hosto• Roger had the solution for Clearwire’s Big Data

problem: Hadoop

But Wait!

• Now we had a solution for Big Data• We needed a Big Data opportunity• We had just the thing…

The Perfect Problem• Customer Usage Data – our commodity to Wholesale

partners

Totally (un)Wired

• Americans used more than 1,304 petabytes of wireless data in 2012 - an increase of 69.3% over the previous 12 months' usage (827 TB)

• Clearwire processes over 3B individual usage detail records each month

Shifting Landscape

• The U.S. wireless industry is a $195.5 billion enterprise - larger than publishing, agriculture, hotels and lodging, air transportation and movies – just to name a few

• Prepaid/Pay-As-You-Go services' share of overall market penetration is 23.4% driving higher exposure of lost revenue if usage delivery is delayed.

• In some cases, a customer can consume data faster than we can bill for it

Anatomy Of Latency - Legacy

IT UsageProcessing

ASN GW PTS SPB WholesalePartners

Internet

AAA

OSS SDU

1 Hour Up to 90 Minutes

Let’s Talk Numbers

• Assume a 2GB plan• An HD movie from Netflix consumes 2+ GB per hour

• Assume wholesale price = $6/GB• Assume the retail price for a GB of data (as top up or

overage) ranges from $20 – $100

As if that wasn’t enough -

• Clearwire was locked into a very expensive vendor contract which handled both network provisioning and usage delivery needs

• Legacy solution was not adaptable or flexible

• We needed something innovative, reliable, internally supportable, scalable – and we needed it fast

Putting ingenuITy to Work!

• Roger’s idea was suddenly a project• We needed to build a platform to ingest, process, and

provide cleaned usage data for downstream applications – and quickly

• We needed:• A Hadoop Cluster• 24x7 Operations• Code to ingest data and handle a myriad of business

rules• Integration with legacy and new systems

Atlas was Born

• Development work began immediately on Clearwire’s private cloud infrastructure

• Selected BigTop Packaging of Apache Hadoop v1.0.1• Custom code leveraging Hive and other common tools

to ingest and process data was written• Infrastructure was built

Hybrid Approach to Hadoop

• Virtual Edge Nodes• Leveraged our existing private cloud

• Physical Data Nodes• Per Unit Cost (Storage & CPU) was lower than

existing infrastructure• Smaller and more efficient than you think

• 24 data nodes, each with 3TB of usable storage• Gives us 72TB of usable space• 3x block replication for production data

• Deployed identical DR/Analytics platform

Operational in No Time

• 2.5 months from project approval to production• Leveraged our existing support organizations

• Solution leveraged common tools, did not require specialized teams

• Fault tolerance inherent within Hadoop helps us minimize late night calls

• An endless supply of data was quickly flowing through the system

• The results were looking good!

Real Results

• 65% improvement in end to end delivery times• From 2.5 hours to 1.3 hours

• Reduced catch up time from upstream outages by more than half

• Reduced outage impacts by introducing flexibility to deliver partial files

• Eliminated 4 hour weekly usage delivery outages tied to provisioning system maintenance

Anatomy of Latency - Now

ASN GW PTS SPB WholesalePartners

Internet

AAA

OSS SDU

1 Hour Average of 15 Minutes

Atlas Medusa

~6 Minutes ~9 Minutes

Real (Financial) Results

• 6 month return on investment• Delivered at 1/3 the cost of competing solutions• Foundational – Enabling Wholesale support plan of

legacy platform migration• Saving Clearwire 10’s of millions of dollars over life of

contract and internalizing support and development

The Intangibles

• Proved to internal and external partners that we deliver what we promise with limited negative impacts to ongoing business• This was KEY to the speed at which we were able to

migrate our billing platform• Delivered more than just a single, targeted process –

delivered an enterprise usage platform to grow from• Kept true to our innovative spirit and the commitment

to IT professionals that they can make a difference

Evolution – Proving More

The Atlas Hadoop platform is now a go-to IT solution

• LTE Usage Data – Now in production • Other Data Sources - ESR Data • Data Replication and real-time ETL• Exploring opportunities with network team to move

closer to usage generation• Changing mindset of what IT can mean to an

organization

Q & A