Truecaller halves costs and latency, scales smarter with Redpanda

Challenge

Stalled growth and costly infrastructure

Based in Stockholm, Truecaller is the leading global platform for caller ID and spam blocking, enabling safe and relevant conversations for nearly 450 million monthly users.

Spam analytics and other business-critical services rely on Truecaller’s data pipeline for accurate real-time data, which is essential for helping users decide whether to answer a call. Behind the scenes, Truecaller runs multiple Apache Kafka^® clusters across two regions, with a massive cluster in Asia supporting their most critical pipeline. The setup had become extremely costly in terms of infrastructure.

“It came with a big overhead of having dedicated people and teams maintaining those clusters,” says Senior Backend Engineer, Mikhail Artemev. “It was expensive and unscalable. And if a problem did occur, we were heavily reliant on particular people.”

The more time the team spent on cluster maintenance, the more they fell behind on their internal projects. They hit storage limitations with large clusters, which took a long time to resolve and caused headaches for downstream teams and services relying on those clusters. 

Performance issues started to develop, and they had low visibility of their overall deployment. With various upcoming projects in H2, the infrastructure team needed to find a way to free up their time. The question was: would a managed option be a better fit for the business?

Why Redpanda 

A fully-managed solution that supports future scale

When evaluating alternatives to self-hosted clusters, Truecaller set some basic criteria. Any solution would have to:

• be a fully-managed service
• perform better than their existing self-managed clusters 
• support future scale

Redpanda Cloud’s fully-managed service includes provisioning, 24/7 monitoring, and maintenance — including security patches and fixes. With manual and time-consuming processes off Truecaller's plate, the team would have peace of mind while freeing up their time for high impact work. 

Plus, with Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC), Truecaller could run Redpanda in their GCP environment, allowing the company to comply with data locality and privacy regulations.

While the primary advantage of switching to Redpanda was moving to a hassle-free, fully managed solution, Redpanda also brought other benefits to the table. Its full compatibility with the Kafka API lets the team keep using the same tooling they already know. And, with a 99.99% availability SLA and cost savings from Redpanda's Tiered Storage, Truecaller could improve performance and operations while lowering costs. 

Mikhail praised Redpanda's partnership during the migration, saying, “Redpanda’s support team was especially helpful throughout all stages of migration. From cluster deployment to coding assistance, they were competent and always there when we needed them.” 

“We spend almost no time dealing with cluster maintenance anymore. We don’t update it. We don’t fix it. It is all done by the Redpanda team, who are very responsive.”

Results

A renewed focus on growth, not maintenance

With Redpanda, Truecaller gained a high-performance, fully managed service that saves 58% on annual infrastructure spending. By eliminating management and reducing costs, the infrastructure team now has more time (and resources) to spend on initiatives that move the company forward.

“Our latencies dropped by almost half, which is just perfect,“ Mikhail says.

The low latency combined with high data availability makes Redpanda a scalable solution capable of supporting Truecaller’s continued growth. As a result, millions of Truecaller users now have the most accurate, up-to-date information when deciding whether to answer a call — and that makes communication safer for everyone.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this case study are personal and may not represent those of Truecaller and its employees.