About Adform

Adform is a global full-stack AdTech platform, offering a demand-side platform (DSP), supply-side platform (SSP), and data management platform (DMP). With nine data centers worldwide, Adform processes billions of ad events daily, handling real-time bidding (RTB), audience segmentation, and campaign optimization for leading advertisers and publishers. To be successful, Adform has to operate with millisecond speeds, as its customers depend on low-latency data access, real-time processing, and system uptime.

Challenge

Scaling real-time bidding and analytics

Adform’s initial architecture relied on Microsoft SQL Server and Cassandra, using batch-based processing for user profiles and campaign analytics. However, as data volumes surged, they encountered severe scalability, performance, and availability challenges. Their global infrastructure needed to handle 11M+ operations per second and process between 900K–1.8M bid requests per second, all while maintaining millisecond-level response times.

Adform needed a high-performance, highly available solution to support real-time bidding and campaign reporting without the limitations of batch processing and high operational overhead.

  • Scaling challenges with Cassandra

    Expanding Cassandra was costly and complex, with 250+ nodes across multiple global data centers

  • Batch processing was operationally inefficient

    Slow insights hurt campaign performance, causing 4+ hour delays, which ultimately limited real-time optimizations and decision-making.

  • Availability risks

    Scaling required manual intervention, and repeated node failures caused delays

Solution

Migrating to Aerospike for real-time processing

Adform migrated from Cassandra and Microsoft SQL Server to Aerospike, redesigning its architecture to support real-time event processing, instant lookups, and simplified scaling.

With Aerospike’s predictable performance and auto-scaling capabilities, Adform eliminated downtime risks and simplified infrastructure management, enabling seamless growth without constant tuning.

  • Aerospike replaces batch processing with real-time key-value lookups.

  • Document-like collection data types (CDTs) efficiently store and update campaign metrics.

  • Kafka integration enables high-speed streaming event processing.

  • Edge-to-system of record architecture reduces strain on central databases and ensures low-latency decisioning.

Results

High performance, lower costs, and real-time insights

Aerospike transformed Adform’s infrastructure, enabling real-time campaign reporting, lower operational costs, and industry-leading uptime. Adform gained a future-proof, real-time architecture that can handle massive data volumes with low latency and high availability by eliminating batch bottlenecks, simplifying scaling, and reducing infrastructure costs.

  • 50% reduction in server footprint

    From 32-node Cassandra to 3-node Aerospike clusters per data center

  • 99.999% uptime

    Ensuring continuous ad bidding and analytics

  • 4x performance improvement

    Processing 11M+ operations per second

  • Real-time campaign reporting

    Reducing data delays from 4 hours to seconds

  • Edge storage with Aerospike + Kafka

    Optimizing data processing across global data centers
The main thing I love about Aerospike is the performance—both in the high number of operations it can handle and the ability to do so with far fewer servers. What also surprised me was how fast we got things running—we were able to set up a cluster and start working on solutions almost immediately.

Andrius Mazeiva

Technical Product Owner, Adform

Aerospike is Adform’s secret weapon—the enabling data store that allows us to do real-time bidding and make money. Aerospike is fast, predictable, reliable, and handles large volumes of data, enabling us to provide real-time reporting back to advertisers and giving us an edge over competitors.

Peter Milne

Senior Architect, Adform