Customer story

TruAudience cuts latency 100x and TCO 68% by replacing Cassandra

About TransUnion TruAudience

TransUnion is one of the three largest global credit reporting agencies. For over 50 years, it has helped businesses and consumers build trust in financial transactions by stewarding and analyzing identity data.

Through its 2020 acquisition of Signal, TransUnion expanded into identity-enabled marketing, launching the TruAudience platform. TruAudience provides leading capabilities in real-time identity resolution and cross-channel marketing solutions.

Challenge

Open source limits business growth

TruAudience’s Customer Identity Platform was originally built on Cassandra, which became an operational bottleneck.

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High operational overhead

Managing large-scale Cassandra clusters drained engineering time and focus, shifting attention from innovation to infrastructure upkeep.

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Severe latency and SLA violations

The platform’s p99 latencies reached up to 3.9 seconds, missing SLA commitments and degrading customer experience.

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Costly and unstable infrastructure

Cassandra’s server sprawl peaked at 550 servers, increasing costs and triggering frequent outages that slowed the business.

Solution

High-performance platform built to scale

To meet the growing demands of real-time identity resolution, TruAudience replaced Cassandra with Aerospike’s real-time, multi-model database. This shift enabled major improvements in infrastructure efficiency, performance, and scalability.

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Infrastructure consolidation from 450 to 60 servers

Aerospike’s Hybrid Memory Architecture required far fewer nodes to handle TruAudience’s large-scale workload, shrinking the server footprint by over 85% while increasing throughput.

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Cross-region resiliency with Aerospike XDR

Aerospike’s cross-datacenter replication enabled consistent performance across five geographically dispersed clusters, ensuring uptime and disaster tolerance.

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From seconds to milliseconds latency

Read latencies dropped from 4 seconds to just 23 milliseconds at the 99th percentile, enabling TruAudience to meet strict real-time SLAs.

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10x acceleration of business processes

Key operations that once took six days now finish in 14 hours, freeing engineering teams to focus on product innovation instead of firefighting infrastructure.

Results

Faster operations, lower costs

By switching from Cassandra to Aerospike, TruAudience dramatically improved performance, reduced costs, and freed teams to focus on innovation. The infrastructure footprint shrank by 87%, and TCO dropped by 68% over three years. Key processes now run up to 60 times faster, helping the business meet strict SLAs and accelerate product delivery.

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68% reduction in TCO

Saved millions over three years by cutting infrastructure and support costs.

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100x performance improvement

Reduced p99 latency from 3,900 milliseconds to just 23 milliseconds.

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90%+ faster execution

Mission-critical processes that once took days now complete in hours.

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Server count cut by 87%

Replaced 450 Cassandra nodes with only 60 Aerospike nodes.

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Unlocked engineering bandwidth

Teams are now focused on building and launching new features.

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Cross-region consistency at scale

Real-time replication across five data centers enabled seamless operations and disaster recovery.

Testimonials