Lightbend > Case Studies > Typesafe Boosts Heluna Anti-Spam Service with Scala, Akka, and Play Framework

Typesafe Boosts Heluna Anti-Spam Service with Scala, Akka, and Play Framework

Customer Company Size

Mid-size Company

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Typesafe Platform
Scala
Akka
Play Framework

Tech Stack

Scala
Akka
Play Framework
CouchDB
Redis

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

Applicable Industries

Software
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Heluna is a cloud-based anti-spam service provider that has been in operation since 2004. The company offers a unique SaaS-based solution that integrates seamlessly with existing email infrastructures to filter out spam and deliver clean messages efficiently. Heluna's service is trusted by its customers to filter out approximately 78% of all email messages, which are typically spam, while ensuring timely delivery of legitimate emails. The system benefits from years of experience and automated learning, allowing it to adapt and improve its spam detection capabilities continuously. Heluna's commitment to providing a reliable and effective anti-spam solution has made it a trusted partner for businesses seeking to protect their email communications from spam and other malicious content.

The Challenge

Heluna faced a significant challenge in scaling its anti-spam service to meet the growing demand for processing millions of email messages daily. The existing platform, which relied on legacy technologies like Sendmail, Perl, and C, was unable to scale horizontally to accommodate the increasing volume of emails. This lack of scalability threatened the reliability and performance of Heluna's service, prompting the need for a more robust and scalable solution. The founder and chief architect, Mark Beeson, recognized that the current architecture was untenable for long-term growth and sought to improve the system's scalability, performance, and operational visibility.

The Solution

To address the scalability challenges, Heluna adopted the Typesafe Platform, which includes Scala, Akka, and Play Framework. Scala, a general-purpose programming language, was chosen for its ability to distribute computation across multicore servers and datacenters, making it ideal for modern cloud-computing workloads. Akka, a toolkit for building concurrent and distributed applications, simplified the concurrency problem by providing a higher level of abstraction through its Actor-based model. This allowed developers to focus on business logic rather than low-level tasks. The Play Framework, with its lightweight and stateless architecture, ensured minimal resource consumption for highly scalable applications. The new architecture consisted of three main components: Mail Accepter, Mail Filtering, and Mail Delivery. The Mail Accepter processed incoming emails using a Scala application, while the Mail Filtering component utilized Akka actors for high-level filtering and anti-spam systems. Finally, the Mail Delivery component used Akka actors to send emails to client systems. This flexible architecture allowed Heluna to scale its operations easily, leveraging Amazon's EC2 infrastructure for additional nodes as needed.

Operational Impact

Heluna's new architecture, based on the Typesafe Platform, provided a flexible and scalable solution that could grow organically with the business's needs.
The implementation of Scala, Akka, and Play Framework allowed Heluna to improve the performance and scalability of its anti-spam service significantly.
The new system architecture enabled Heluna to process and deliver over 300,000 clean messages daily, despite the high volume of spam and virus attacks.
The use of Futures in the new system architecture resulted in low CPU usage and blocking time, improving overall system efficiency.
The transition to the new platform was completed in approximately two months, resulting in a concise and efficient code base.

Quantitative Benefit

Heluna's solution now processes and delivers over 300,000 clean messages daily.
The new architecture allows for the processing of hundreds of millions of emails, significantly increasing the system's capacity.