An AdTech system designed to handle over 200B daily requests in real time
About Freewheel
Freewheel, a subsidiary of Comcast Advanced Advertising, was established to revolutionize the way ads are served across media through programmatic advertising. They use technology and marketing acumen to facilitate ad campaigns for over 90% of the top media companies in the US and Europe, and at events such as the Super Bowl, World Cup, the Olympics, March Madness, Sunday Night Football, and much more. Their mission is to create the most extensive premium marketplace, seamlessly connecting buyers and sellers, maximizing value for all stakeholders involved.
Supporting real-time decision making with exceptional speed and accuracy
AdTech is an extremely competitive market that transacts billions of dollars a day in online, real-time, bidding to purchase ad space. Freewheel was under pressure to offer innovative services that enable data-driven decision making with exceptional speed and accuracy. Their platform allows publishers, (i.e. NBC or FOX) to offer advertising space, and advertisers (like Toyota or Nike) the ability to purchase that space via a real-time exchange. When effective, advertisers are able to reach out to consumers with personalized messaging, delivered at the right time, to the right screens, whether it be a connected TV, mobile device, desktop computer, or elsewhere.
In order to attract and retain customers, Freewheel’s services needed to:
Protect client brands: Ensure advertisements do not appear in undesirable contexts, like gambling apps or sensitive geographic locations.
Offer customization: Offer clients extensive customization options for targeting their ad campaigns.
Adapt to viewer habits: Address the diversity of viewer content consumption across numerous digital platforms.
The platform was a complex system that had to be designed to handle massive amounts of data at sub-millisecond latencies while delivering high performance in real time.
Handle massive data scale
Manage 216 billion bid requests daily, which is 2.5 million per second, requiring rapid processing within milliseconds.
Efficient data storage and access
Implement efficient storage solutions for vast amounts of user data from first and third-party providers.
Modernized infrastructure
Transition from AWS i3 to AWS i4i, and harness AWS Nitro SSDs to boost performance.
Integrate advanced features
Add features like bid augmentation and user identity connection without compromising latency.
A high-volume, high-speed backbone to power Freewheel’s AdTech platforms
Aerospike's solution provides the backbone for Freewheel's AdTech operations, powering high-volume, high-speed programmatic advertising for both Freewheel’s supply and demand platforms. Through robust and rapid data processing, the solution manages user data, collected from various sources, and provides actionable insights for optimization. The Aerospike database was specifically chosen for its combination of distributed architecture, exceptional performance, high-speed processing, scalability, throughput, and high availability across different availability zones.
Aerospike's technical solution for Freewheel includes:
Distributed system architecture
Aerospike’s system is designed to efficiently distribute data across multiple nodes, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance. This architecture is crucial for handling Freewheel’s sheer volume of data transactions.
Efficient real-time data processing
Aerospike excels in real-time, predictable data processing, a crucial feature for Freewheel’s bid augmentation and user filtering processes. This allows for the quick addition of relevant data points to bids, such as geographical information, weather, or user profiles.
Data storage flexibility and efficiency
Aerospike's use of NVMe SSD technology on AWS i3 instances, and later transitioning to AWS i4i instances with AWS Nitro SSDs, significantly improved data storage and access speeds. This upgrade was vital in handling Freewheel’s growing data volume and complexity.
RESTful API integration
The system incorporates a RESTful API for user interaction, allowing Freewheel's users to create campaigns and upload creative seamlessly, contributing to the system's overall functionality and user experience.
Achieving exceptional performance with an efficient data footprint
With Aerospike, Freewheel can effectively manage complex data sets, mixed workloads, and high volumes of requests in real-time — all crucial for success in targeted advertising and delivering audience insights. Aerospike allows Freewheel to achieve aggressive performance goals for its system and also set the foundation for future growth.
2.5M concurrent requests per second
With 2.5M requests / second, and 216 billion bid requests daily, Aerospikes provides predictable scalability to handle increasing volumes of data and bid requests with consistent reliability.
<30 millisecond bid times
Aerospike allows Freewheel to support the real-time decisions made during bidding, with a total average time for a successful bid of under 30 milliseconds.
<1 millisecond read time latencies
Segment lookup times are processed at 14 million requests per second, with P50 latency under one millisecond and P99 latency in a single digit millisecond.
3-5x node reduction
With Aerospike’s data storage flexibility and the ability to leverage flash memory, Freewheel is able to process 200TB data per day, 6 trillion bid requests per year, and reduce node count by 3-5x
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