Yandex open-sources YaFF, a technology that reduce server CPU usage by up to 20%

Yandex has open-sourced YaFF (Yet Another Flat Format), a technology that reduces server CPU usage by up to 20% by allowing applications to access data without deserialization. The technology, already deployed in Yandex's advertising platform handling hundreds of thousands of requests per second, is now available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.

YaFF addresses inefficiencies in Protobuf, the widely used data transmission standard that requires deserialization and can consume up to 10% of CPU resources in large-scale systems. Unlike alternatives such as FlatBuffers, YaFF works alongside existing Protobuf infrastructure without requiring costly code rewrites or migrations, preserving existing schemas and APIs.

For data-intensive services like search and advertising, the CPU savings can translate to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual infrastructure costs, according to Yandex.