By using Amazon DynamoDB in conjunction with Apache Storm, AdRoll can replicate its data set across the globe in under 50 milliseconds, providing speedy response times for both bidding and serving up ads to customers—while keeping costs low.

AdRoll also benefits from the scalability provided by AWS. “AWS provides us with the capability to handle traffic that comes from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other heavily traveled sites—so that we can serve up more than 50 billion impressions a day,” Volonghi says. “It’s cost-effective, too—we spend more on snacks than we do on Amazon DynamoDB.”

Using AWS has made it easy for AdRoll to onboard new customers. When a new customer comes on board, AdRoll’s machines need to be able to handle all additional traffic instantly. Usually, in traditional on-premise infrastructures, onboarding a new customer means going through a process of approvals to get new machines and add them to the Hadoop cluster, procure more storage, etc. It can take up to 90 days. “With AWS, we don’t have to worry about any of that,” Volonghi says. “If we’re close to capacity, we just Auto Scale a few new instances and we’re done.”

The company can quickly build business by joining new exchanges, no matter where they are physically located. “AWS has regions close to all the worldwide traffic exchanges, so when a new exchange comes on board, we can take advantage of it immediately,” Volonghi says. “It’s as simple as flipping a switch and opening a new data center where our machines can get traffic. After that, we can start bidding. Easy."

Volonghi credits AWS with providing the scalability and capacity on demand that AdRoll needed to build its business. “When our business was growing really fast, using AWS allowed us to scale and optimize our algorithms—and get rid of extra capacity. AWS saves us time and money. We don’t need a bigger data center, we don’t need to get more operations people on board, and we don’t need to acquire more machines just because we have to scale up.”