Customer Stories

The Trade Desk achieves hyperscale for real-time bidding

The results

800B

queries per day

9X

reduction in node count

<8ms

reduction in data access

10M

queries per second
About the Company

The Trade Desk is the world's largest independent programmatic advertising DSP

The Trade Desk is an advertising technology company that provides a self-service omni-channel platform through which media buyers can purchase digital advertising. The company was founded in 2009 and has outpaced growth in worldwide programmatic advertising by over 50%, generating $400M in revenue with a market capitalization of $5B.

Challenge

Manage and leverage the firehose of 3rd party data sources for real-time bidding

With around 10 million queries a second, the company has to condense, read, and analyze millions of data points, and store the most relevant data to be quickly accessible.

Improved ad targeting
Running more targeted campaigns w/ an increasing amount of data.
100 billion records with tens of thousands of data points.
Needed to create an offline cold store to store unused data and optimize for real-time systems.
Solution

Hyperscale, real-time bidding leveraging both hot cache and cold store

Aerospike runs at the edge as a cache for real-time bidding—which receives 11 million queries per second (800 billion queries per day) and also as a system of record on AWS to manage peak loads of 20 million writes per second in its “cold storage” of user profiles.

Record-level compression

Reduced machines needed to 60.

Record-based model

All data put into one record and not nearly as CPU-intensive.

Flexible data organization

Use one key to represent many different dimensions and get back only the data needed for a given use case.

Reduce in-datacenter footprint

Write 30MM key-value tuples/sec into 1 PB cold cache.

Rapid access to cold store

Thaw data in 8ms for RTB.

Solution areas

RESULTS

Results of The Trade Desk real-time bidding with Aerospike

Combining a hot cache with a cold store provided The Trade Desk with more bid opportunities and a more efficient infrastructure.

Hot caches contain only the data needed for current ad campaigns

Hot caches globally refreshed within hours of new campaign activation

Data delivery impact on bidding site performance eliminated

Aerospike Connect for Spark combined with cold storage cluster allows for advanced analytics

Additional resources

Learn more about Aerospike