Kakao Infrastructure Team Pushes for Largest-Scale Server Operations and SaaS Infrastructure Transition in Korea

The Kakao Infrastructure Team is the organization responsible for the systems and traffic of Kakao services used by the entire national population, operating the largest-scale infrastructure in Korea. The team consists of four parts: System Engineering, Network Engineering, Data Center, and Infrastructure Planning, providing stable and user-friendly infrastructure services so that developers can focus solely on development.

Operational Structure and Tech Stack

Each part is responsible for operating hundreds of thousands of servers, large-scale traffic distribution technology, data center construction and operation, and infrastructure budget management. The tech stack is very broad, including Linux-based system engineering, DevOps (Python/Go), SRE, network networking, and DNS/GSLB. In particular, it possesses hybrid infrastructure management capabilities covering both cloud and on-premises environments.

Infrastructure Enhancement and SaaS Transition

The Kakao Infrastructure Team aims for API-based automation, building a Self-Service environment, and providing Managed services. To this end, it is supporting the easy provision of physical servers as if they were virtualized, and is working on transitioning open-source platforms previously developed for internal use into SaaS forms. Additionally, it is pursuing a strategy to effectively integrate public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and GCP with its own infrastructure to simultaneously secure cost efficiency and stability.

Organizational Culture and Ideal Talent

The Infrastructure Team advocates a culture of voluntary participation with the motto "If it's inconvenient, improve it." It encourages employees to develop and share tools needed for work on their own, and to proactively adopt technologies of interest to service them. This self-driven nature provides an environment where infrastructure engineers can solve the complexity of large-scale systems and solidify the foundational knowledge required across the IT industry.