LY Corporation, formed through the merger of Yahoo Japan and Line, has begun a large-scale infrastructure integration to replace an overly customised OpenStack cloud with a new unified cloud called Flava, The Register reported on April 7.

LY Corporation services such as the Line messenger and the Yahoo Japan portal have about 300 million monthly users. Line’s internal cloud, Verda, consists of 4 OpenStack clusters running 130,000 VMs on 11,000 hosts. Yahoo Japan’s YNW cloud runs more than 160,000 VMs across more than 160 OpenStack clusters on 27,000 servers.

The new Flava cloud consists of a single OpenStack cluster with more than 500 hosts and over 9,000 VMs.

Ryuutarou Inoue (이노우에 류타로), head of LY Corporation’s cloud infrastructure unit, said OpenStack in the legacy cloud had been overly customised, making upgrades difficult. He said Flava will maintain an upstream OpenStack approach and minimise custom patches.

Inoue also said hardware failures occur somewhere every day. He said the company automated most steps from failure detection to on-site data centre work requests and reintegrating replacement hardware. He said it plans to use large language models in the future to handle complex failure patterns that require decision-making.