Bridging cloud technologies: Lineate’s journey with AWS and Aerospike

If you feel like you’re seeing more ads on the internet these days, you’re not wrong. Businesses have found that internet advertising – done properly – is a major source of customers and revenue.

But knowing where and how to place internet advertising is a big job that’s spawned a new industry: AdTech, or advertising technology. AdTech algorithms have to field six to nine billion data points per day and deliver targeting information in 60 ms or less – the time it takes to click a mouse or a key.

If done right, the rewards can be huge. One company, Lineate, reports that its customers can see up to a sevenfold increase in revenue potential.

“Our AdTech customers have just an absolute torrent of data coming in and a need to query against that data in near-real time,” said Harrison Green-Fishback, Lineate’s chief technology officer. “They need to answer not necessarily the most complex questions in the world, but questions that become incredibly difficult to answer once you’re dealing with the volume of data they have.”

About Lineate

Lineate, a custom software development and consulting service shop, has been a long-time partner of Aerospike and AWS. The company has been in business for over 20 years, with its U.S. headquarters in New York and its primary and largest development office in Tbilisi, Georgia. Its more than 200 developers provide software development services for clients in a wide variety of business domains and specialize in moving and managing large amounts of data – particularly in AdTech, where the company has worked since the early 2010s.

“We’ll build what you need, but we have a specialization on moving a lot of data, getting a lot of data into really good shape for you, and making sure that you are able to answer questions about your data as quickly as you need it,” Green-Fishback said.

Where Aerospike fits in

Lineate has found Aerospike to be a perfect fit for its AdTech customers, Green-Fishback said. “A while back, when a lot of the new databases were coming out, our engineering leadership did some analysis of Aerospike and compared it with other platforms, and we discovered that it would be perfect for our AdTech customers” because of how well it deals with the speed and volume of its customers’ data –typically out of the box, he said.

And with each new implementation, Lineate’s Aerospike expertise continues to grow, Green-Fishback said.

“As software consultants, we want to offer the best holistic solutions for our customers,” Green-Fishback said. “Software developers are modern-day plumbers. We build things out of components, and when we find a component that works, we want to reuse it. When we find one like Aerospike, that allows us to say, ‘We know this will work for you. We’ve done the analysis ourselves, read their white papers, and have clear, demonstrable implementations,’ the next sale, the next implementation, is easy.”

That also leads to a growing knowledge base. “We enjoy working with people that we’ve worked with for a long time. I mean, that’s something we humans like to do,” Green-Fishback said. “As we have new developers join our company, and they need to learn the tools that we’re using, having a decade or more of experience with a particular tool allows the engineers who have been with us for a long time to pass on that hands-on knowledge to our new engineers. Our development teams come in and confidently say, ‘Hey, we are experts in this system,’ as opposed to we are experts at learning things very quickly.”

Working with AWS

Aerospike’s synergy with AWS also helps, Green-Fishback added. “Our job is to provide the best overall solutions for our customers. It’s really easy for us when we’re dealing with a greenfield project to say, ‘Hey, you know what? You want to be in the cloud. It’s going to save you a lot of time, a lot of pain, and a lot of money,” and AWS is the right solution for that, nine times out of ten,’” he said. “Similarly, if we have use cases, which we often do, where Aerospike is the right tool to use, we’re going to say that to our customers with no hesitation.”

The same is true for clients who already know they want to use AWS, Green-Fishback said. “A lot of times, and more and more, customers want both of those things, right? They want to be in the cloud, they want to be in AWS, and we’re looking at their use cases, and we’re saying ‘Aerospike’s a great fit for that,’” he said. “We’re able to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Aerospike works beautifully in AWS. It is a part of the ecosystem at this point, so there’s no worry. There’s no reservation about rolling the two out. You don’t need to choose between the two. You can have the best of both worlds.’ It’s a fantastic place for us to be when we think that both solutions are the right solution for a particular customer.”