About AppsFlyer

AppsFlyer is the world’s leading mobile attribution and analytics platform, enabling app marketers to measure and optimize their campaigns with unmatched precision. Serving more than 65% of the global mobile measurement market, AppsFlyer supports app developers and marketers across 19 offices, with a data footprint spanning billions of events daily. Its SDK is installed on most mobile devices worldwide, supporting a data-driven ecosystem for app growth.

Challenge

Scaling attribution at massive global scale

To meet increasing real-time data demands from mobile advertising campaigns, AppsFlyer needed a backend that could support petabyte-scale throughput while maintaining millisecond SLAs.

  • Legacy database instability and downtime

    Their previous installs database ran on ~50 AWS instances, with frequent hardware failures, unreliable replication across datacenters , and backup processes that exceeded 24 hours.

  • Growing traffic and unpredictable peaks

    Events like global sporting tournaments or shopping holidays caused traffic spikes that required rapid, elastic scaling.

  • Cost and operational inefficiency

    Hardware costs and support limitations made the system fragile and expensive. The team operated under constant risk of production-impacting failures.

Solution

Blazing-fast infrastructure that scales elastically

Aerospike replaced the legacy NoSQL system with a key-value store purpose-built for low-latency, high-throughput workloads. The migration and rollout were completed in just over two weeks.

  • Massive throughput at ultra-low latency

    Aerospike supports 2.5M writes/sec and 4.5M reads/sec, with p99.9 latency under 1ms, even under peak load. Total reads exceed 400 billion per day .

  • Elastic scalability powered by AKO on Kubernetes

    AppsFlyer runs Aerospike fully as a stateful workload in Kubernetes (EKS) using the Aerospike Kubernetes Operator (AKO) . This enables reliable scale-down by 50% and scale-up by 100% on demand, with zero performance degradation .

  • Cost-efficient architecture with Graviton and Karpenter

    Running on AWS Graviton instances and orchestrated with Karpenter, AppsFlyer achieved a 60% reduction in compute costs . Node provisioning completes in under one minute.

Results

Real-time performance with radically lower cost and effort

AppsFlyer achieved industry-leading performance with dramatically lower infrastructure and operational burden.

  • 60% lower compute cost

    Total infrastructure cost dropped significantly, even after including the Aerospike license. Internal modeling showed more than $10M in projected savings compared to DynamoDB at similar scale and traffic.

  • <1ms read latency at p99.9, even at scale

    Performance remains consistent across 200+ dynamically scaling nodes.

  • Production migration in <3 weeks

    The full evaluation, benchmarking, and production rollout of Aerospike on Kubernetes was completed in under 18 days.

  • Reduced operational overhead and tooling

    Eliminated fragile scripts and legacy provisioning logic with Kubernetes-native automation and open source tools.
We write around 2.5 million objects/sec and read over 4.5 million/sec. Still, our p99.9 latency is under 1ms. That’s extraordinary performance.

Victor Gershkovich

Platform Group Leader, AppsFlyer

Before Aerospike, our installs database was unstable and costly. Backups took more than a day, and we were in constant fear of failure. With Aerospike, we immediately gained stability and cut hardware costs by two-thirds. The thing I like most? It just works.

Ido Barkan

Software Architect, AppsFlyer