Customer story

AppsFlyer scales attribution analytics to 400B reads/day with Aerospike

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.

Testimonials

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

AppsFlyerPlatform Group Leader

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.