Managing 70B+ ad requests per day

AppLovin is a mobile marketing platform that helps brands acquire and re-engage customers through mobile advertising. Its platform connects advertisers with billions of mobile devices and evaluates advertising opportunities in real time across global infrastructure.

Mobile advertising platforms operate under extreme time constraints. Each ad opportunity requires the system to retrieve user data, evaluate campaign targeting rules, and determine which advertisement to serve.

As AppLovin grew, the platform needed to process tens of billions of ad requests per day while maintaining strict response-time requirements.

Real-time ad decisions within milliseconds

In the real-time bidding ecosystem, each advertising request must be evaluated quickly enough to return a response before the opportunity disappears. The system must decide whether to bid and which ad to deliver within roughly 50 milliseconds.

To make that decision, the platform must instantly retrieve user profile data and campaign information while processing hundreds of thousands of requests per second.

Rapid growth in devices and data

AppLovin’s growth meant managing data for billions of mobile devices while processing increasingly large volumes of ad traffic.

The infrastructure needed to support tens of billions of daily requests and provide predictable performance even as traffic and data volumes expanded globally.

Infrastructure must evolve with the market

The advertising ecosystem evolves rapidly. AppLovin wanted to build a flexible infrastructure that could support growth and new capabilities such as retargeting and attribution without rebuilding the core data platform. As these features increased data volumes and request rates, the system required a database capable of scaling horizontally while maintaining consistent performance.

AppLovin deployed Aerospike as the real-time database powering core components of its advertising platform.

Aerospike stores device and user profile data used to evaluate advertising opportunities and select the correct advertisement in real time.

Millisecond access to device data

Each device interacting with the platform has associated profile data used during ad selection.

Aerospike enables AppLovin to retrieve this data in approximately one to two milliseconds, allowing the system to evaluate campaigns and user context quickly enough to meet strict latency requirements.

Distributed clusters supporting global traffic

AppLovin operates multiple Aerospike clusters supporting different workloads across the advertising platform.

Across these deployments, there are:

• 35 Aerospike clusters in production

• More than 350 servers running Aerospike

• Over 700 TB of disk storage and 70 TB of RAM

• Approximately 250 billion records stored

• About 4 billion records expired daily

This architecture allows the system to scale horizontally while maintaining predictable performance.

Integrating Aerospike with Spark for analytics

AppLovin also integrated Aerospike with Apache Spark to accelerate analytics and debugging workflows.

Exporting Aerospike data into Spark jobs significantly reduced query turnaround time, enabling faster investigation and analysis of production data.

Aerospike became a foundational component of AppLovin’s advertising infrastructure, enabling the platform to operate at massive scale while maintaining predictable performance.

70B+ ad requests processed daily

AppLovin’s platform now processes more than seventy billion advertising requests per day across billions of mobile devices.

Billions of device profiles accessed in milliseconds

Aerospike enables fast access to device and user profile data required for real-time ad decisioning, maintaining millisecond-scale response times even under massive request volumes.

Dramatically faster analytics workflows

Integrating Aerospike with Spark accelerated internal analytics and debugging tasks, enabling some queries to run up to 750× faster than previous approaches.