How Adform transformed real-time AdTech with Aerospike, achieving 99.999% uptime
About Adform
Adform is a global full-stack ad tech 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 per day, handling real-time bidding (RTB), audience segmentation, and campaign optimization for leading advertisers and publishers. Operating at millisecond speeds, Adform’s success depends on low-latency data access, real-time processing, and system uptime.
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
Slow insights hurt campaign performance
Batch processing caused 4+ hour delays, limiting real-time optimization and decision-making
Availability risks
Scaling required manual intervention, and repeated node failures caused delays
Migrating to Aerospike for real-time processing
Adform migrated from Cassandra and 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
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.
By eliminating batch bottlenecks, simplifying scaling, and reducing infrastructure costs, Adform gained a future-proof, real-time architecture that can handle massive data volumes with low latency and high availability.
99.999% uptime
Ensuring continuous ad bidding and analytics
4x performance improvement
Processing 11M+ operations per second
50% reduction in server footprint
From 32-node Cassandra to 3-node Aerospike clusters per DC
Real-time campaign reporting
Reducing data delays from 4 hours to seconds
Edge storage with Aerospike + Kafka
Optimizing data processing across global data centers
Transforming batch-based data processing pipeline
Adform, a leading Ad Tech company, leverages Aerospike for real-time bidding, profile building, and stream processing. Switching from relational databases, Adform needed faster record retrieval. Aerospike’s speed, scalability, and efficiency on fewer servers improved operations, making it a core component of their platform and outperforming other key-value stores.
Testimonials
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
AdformTechnical Product OwnerAerospike 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
AdformSenior ArchitectAdditional resources
For a deeper understanding and more insights, explore these additional resources.
- Video
Adform: Real-time Business Intelligence with Big Data: Edge-to-Core in Milliseconds
This talk at Big Data London presents a high level architectural view of real-time campaign reporting using Aerospike as both the edge and core data stores. In this real-world example, the Edge database feeds the core database via Kafka and/or Spark where the Edge database stores events and the Core Database stores statistics that are used for performance and billing. - Video
Peter Milne Adform Testimonial at Big Data London
Peter Milne, Head of Technology Architecture at Adform discusses why Adform is able to rely on Aerospike’s data platform to accomplish and service all partners and vendors that are often involved with the Adtech industry and their work. - Video
Adform: Transforming Batch-based Data Processing Pipeline
Early findings from running Aerospike on top of Kubernetes, and automating deployments using Spinnaker.