Journey to real-time fraud prevention
About Forter
Forter is a leading digital commerce company specializing in fraud prevention and trust solutions for online businesses. Founded in 2013, Forter has revolutionized the way e-commerce companies protect themselves against fraud. They protect over 1.2 billion customers, processing decisions on over $350 billion per year for over 200,000 businesses, and hold over 1 billion identities in their data set. Forter leverages advanced machine learning algorithms, real-time data, and a global network of merchants to deliver accurate and instant decisions, allowing businesses to accept more legitimate transactions while minimizing fraudulent activities.
Enhancing database performance for fraud analytics
Forter’s platform required a high-performance, low-latency database to handle the enormous volume of transactions and data points analyzed for real-time browsing sessions. It needed to be able to handle writes at 180K/second, reads at 75K/second, with an average message size of 2 kilobytes (KB) and 25 billion objects. Their existing database setup was holding them back.
Latency
Forter’s platform would experience latency spikes, especially during flash sales. High latency issues impacted the speed of fraud detection.
Scalability
Scalability limitations affected performance under heavy loads.
Resource utilization
Inefficient resource utilization led to increased operational costs
Cost
High keep-the-lights-on effort (KTLO) due to high maintenance levels and hardware costs
Transition to Aerospike database for key performance improvements
To address Forter’s performance and scalability issues, Aerospike emerged as the optimal choice due to its unique capabilities tailored for real-time data processing. Aerospike’s platform is designed to handle vast amounts of transactional data with remarkable efficiency and minimal latency, making it an ideal fit for Forter’s stringent requirements. To replace its two-layer architecture with Redis and Couchbase, Forter transitioned to Aerospike’s real-time data platform. Aerospike offered several key advantages.
Low latency
Aerospike provided sub-millisecond performance, crucial for real-time fraud detection
Scalability
Aerospike’s database handled increasing volumes of transactions without downtime or a decline in performance
Cost efficiency
Aerospike’s hybrid memory architecture (HMA) reduced the need for extensive caching layers, leading to significant cost savings
Significant performance improvements
The transition to Aerospike yielded impressive results for Forter. These improvements enabled Forter to provide faster, more reliable fraud prevention services to their clients, reinforcing their position as a leader in the digital commerce industry.
10x better latency
Latency was reduced from 13.3 milliseconds to 1.3 milliseconds, enhancing the speed of fraud detection
Cost savings
40% reduction in hardware costs with less maintenance and better uptime than with Couchbase
Server footprint
Number of servers required decreased from 178 to 50, simplifying management and reducing the risk of server failures
Optimized workload efficiency
Aerospike and AWS Graviton have efficiently handled large volumes of data with low latency, which has also added another 26% reduction in cost
Testimonials
Moving our real-time session use case to Aerospike, gained us predictable and persistent performance with linear scalability and 10x better latency, while also reducing our cost of hardware by 40%
