optAd360 Picks Hostersi and AWS for Global Growth

optAd360 had a classic startup problem—rapidly built systems that needed more stability and agility to grow. With increasing global reach, optAd360 used AWS to provide local hosting to support reduced latency wherever its customers were located.

From its headquarters in Poland, optAd360 provides a variety of ad-serving services around the world. It helps publishers monetize their content across the web, mobile applications, and video. Its systems use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help increase revenues by analyzing how ads are displayed for the best results on any individual site.

 

optAd360 had worked directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) but had outgrown its original infrastructure and some systems like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) had not been updated for some time. Its DevOps team in particular were struggling to cope with the increased demand the growth brought.

 

optAd360 could not analyze performance or make data-based business decisions because its AWS Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack was not collecting data as it should, which was a waste of resources for a company built on data like optAd360. This huge growth and data load meant the company needed to optimize its systems to increase capacity and support growth while reducing management headaches and costs.

optAd360 chose to work with AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Hostersi because of its previous experience around automating marketing systems, global capabilities, and the depth and speed of its 24/7 support.

optAd360 works with more than 3,500 publishers and displays more than 10 billion adverts a month—4,000 ads a second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—viewed by 227 million unique users a week. It is expanding rapidly around the world and aims to double the number of adverts served by next year. It is growing fastest in Asia, and Poland now only accounts for a quarter of its annual revenue of $24 million.

 

Jarosław Wisłocki, head of programmatic optimization at optAd360 says: “Fast growth meant we needed a better testing and DevOps environment. Hostersi and AWS helped us build systems that are stable but can scale fast.

 

“We have to manage a huge amount of data and with ever-more customers, we needed to automate our ability to scale and to bring on new customers.”

 

While the solution that Hostersi and AWS provided is helping optAd360 to save money, that was not its primary motivation for the move. The company needed to be more responsive to its customers, and be able to onboard them much quicker. optAd360 chose to work with Hostersi because of its experience with AWS, and especially the company’s Amazon CloudFront expertise. It proved a good cultural fit as well, as Hostersi meets optAd360’s fast growth priorities by providing a quick response to any issues raised and an understanding of global markets.

 

optAd360 also wanted to be able to develop, test, and deploy new applications faster without the need to maintain infrastructure.

Like many startup companies optAd360 had grown quickly and had to make many on-the-spot technology decisions with a small IT department. It has now reached a size where it needs to think more strategically about its technology, provide more stability to its customers, and increase automation to get the most value from its IT investment.

A key aim of moving to the new systems was to allow the company to continue its rapid growth without being hamstrung by manually onboarding increasing numbers of new customers. While onboarding customers currently takes between 3–4 days and involves lots of manual processes, once the four-environment infrastructure is fully up and running this should only take 24–48 hours, and will be completely automated with customers using a web interface to self service their accounts.

 

Because optAd360’s new system was built using infrastructure as code, everything can be reused and is easier to replicate to create test, development, and production environments. This helps the company process a massive amount of data.

After auditing optAd360’s existing systems, Hostersi decided to build a fresh Kubernetes platform from the ground up, rather than work on an upgrade. It switched the company to a four-environment system—previously, everything ran on one account. Hostersi chose this route as it was faster than fixing what was already in place and made it easier to automate processes and speed up onboarding of new customers—a key goal for optAd360—while also improving security.

 

optAd360 now has an environment for development, one for testing, and one for production, so it can develop and test new applications with no impact on the day-to-day running of its systems. It also has a tools environment that handles provisioning of security roles and access to the other three accounts. This set-up has also eased the burden created by the data that optAd360 must ingest and analyze in order to run its services.

optAd360 operates in 57 countries and wants to expand even further, so the global reach of AWS was an important factor in the company’s decision to go all-in. It uses Amazon CloudFront to serve ads all around the world as quickly as possible, ensuring a better experience for its users and delivering 1,200 terabytes of data each month. Optimizing CloudFront has led to cost savings of up to 30 percent for the company.

 

Hostersi and AWS have also helped the company maintain the highest levels of security and privacy required for its users in different regulatory areas. optAd360 has already benefited from better backup systems which proved their worth when human error led to an incident. Thanks to Hostersi’s implementation skills and AWS, systems were quickly restored with no data lost and no impact on customers or the business.

 

Looking ahead, optAd360 is using AWS to improve its AI systems, to help choose the best advertisements to serve to users, and where to display them on the page to maximize revenues for its customers.