AWS Case Study: Smowtion

Smowtion specializes in the ad-network business, focusing on developing products and solutions for the online advertising industry, and targeting quality audiences. By combining behavioral, predictive, contextual targeting; inventory performance; and extreme targeting techniques, Smowtion allows advertisers to reach their targeted audiences, such as blogs, networks, searches, or social networks. Smowtion works with over 80,000 publishers worldwide, using the same optimization processes, showing the most appropriate ads to visitors and obtaining a higher effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM).

Daniel Lerner, CTO for Smowtion, is in charge of everything involving technology, including investigation, deployment, maintenance, performance, and improvements. He says, “We decided to use Amazon Web Services [AWS] because it fit perfectly with our business. It can scale endlessly and easily; we’ve found it to have 99% uptime; it’s easy to deploy and maintain; and we appreciate Amazon’s professional response time.”

Smowtion has been using AWS since 2008. Lerner notes, “Back then we were real pioneers in deciding that our whole business would rely on Amazon’s architecture.” The company is currently using the following services:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to serve their own adtag
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing to serve frontend and backend dashboards
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for basic database needs
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to interconnect different applications services

The Smowtion team developed all code in-house, using mainly PHP and Perl.

Smowtion is currently serving more than 5 billion impressions on their adnetwork, coming from more than 100,000 publishers. Lerner says, “We believe that building our business on another platform would have been impossible, especially given the fast times our industry runs on.”

The company has learned to take advantage of AWS’s cost management. Lerner explains: “Because any service is charged on a per-use basis, we started changing our focus from ‘using time to enhance a process’ to ‘using cheap hours on AWS to run the process.’” Lerner also likes the management console, and being able to see all services running on one single screen; this feature has helped the business by reducing maintenance and deployment.

Lerner notes, “We have always seen AWS as a company that fits perfectly with our ‘keep it simple’ vision. We hope we can continue to grow side by side, with both businesses helping each other.”

To learn more, visit http://www.smowtion.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .