This open-source tool could help Google and Microsoft save billions by reducing CPU resource usage by 20%, also benefiting small businesses.
Yandex's Perforator helps companies better leverage their current server infrastructure.
Yandex, Russia's leading tech company, has launched an open-source tool called "Perforator," designed to detect and assess inefficiencies in code across an entire codebase. This tool allows DevOps and SysOps teams to optimize applications and reduce infrastructure costs, yielding savings of up to 20% for various businesses, ranging from tech giants like Google and Microsoft to small and medium-sized enterprises.
Perforator utilizes eBPF technology, enabling it to run programs safely within the Linux kernel without impacting system performance. It supports several popular languages such as C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, and Java, and features data analysis and visualization through flame graphs, facilitating problem diagnosis. Additionally, it includes profile-guided optimization (PGO), which can increase the speed of C++ programs by up to 10%.
The company has indicated plans to enhance future versions of Perforator, including better integration for Python and Java, as well as more precise event analysis. Sergey Skvortsov, a senior developer at Yandex and the leader of the team behind this tool, stated that "Perforator helps companies maximize their server performance without compromising efficiency." This tool is especially valuable for large data centers and tech corporations, as well as for small businesses with limited resources, allowing them to optimize their existing infrastructure without the need to acquire new equipment.
Perforator, which has been used internally in Yandex's services for over a year, is now available to businesses, developers, and researchers globally. By operating directly on a company's servers, it reduces reliance on external cloud providers, which is crucial for organizations that have stringent data security requirements.
The potential savings for large service providers can be significant, and small to medium-sized enterprises with on-premises servers can also realize considerable cost reductions. Skvortsov emphasized that "Perforator can be beneficial for companies of all sizes, from small ones with 10 to 100 servers that can save millions annually, to large corporations with thousands of servers, where savings can reach hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars a year."
The source code for Perforator is available for free on GitHub, along with other open-source tools from Yandex.