AWS Enables Audiencerate to Process Over a Billion Requests per Week

Audiencerate bridges the gap between data providers, agencies and brands, enabling marketers to run better performing campaigns with trusted and reliable targeting data. 

One side of the business is dedicated to helping data owners monetize their data and license audiences in the world’s largest programmatic media buying marketplaces. The other side provides targeting data to marketers, enabling them to model and target audiences with more complexity and sophistication. 

Audiencerate relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide 100 percent of its compute and storage capabilities to cope with massive quantities of data and to crunch that data in real time. It also provides the systems that their customers rely on to self-service their accounts and get insight into campaign performance and ad buying strategies.

AWS and its managed services allow the small technical team at Audiencerate to respond quickly to 250 million requests a day and store and analyze 50 terabytes of data a month. It credits its serverless-first strategy for allowing it to focus on the client and not have to worry about security or scalability issues.

Its systems allow it to onboard new clients almost instantly and data owner clients can start seeing revenue within two weeks, far faster than Audiencerate’s competitors.

Clients get access to a Web-based dashboard for managing audiences with AWS CloudFront acting as the content delivery network and ID services handled by Amazon Cognito.

Cookies can be classified in less than 15 seconds and matched with relevant advertisers using Amazon Kinesis.

Enrico Vecchio, CTO at Audiencerate, says, “We’re a small team with the challenge of building a data platform from scratch. When we started out, we sketched on the wall things we didn’t want to do, including maintaining infrastructure, machines, autoscaling, or databases. Then we found the best AWS managed services to deal with each of these. So AWS CloudFormation and AWS Lambda deal with infrastructure, Lambda and Amazon Kinesis look after machines, AWS Elastic Beanstalk solves our autoscaling issues and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon DynamoDB deal with the database.” 

The team also built a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline that works across accounts and is multi-regional to easily deliver software updates using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline.

AWS services enable Audiencerate to stay compliant with data protection and privacy regulations across a variety of different regions. All data is encrypted at all stages of the journey—in the Amazon S3 buckets, in DynamoDB, and in Amazon Kinesis, where the real-time analysis happens. Audiencerate uses AWS CloudTrail to log all account activity for auditing and forensics if necessary.“

AWS deals with the security and the scaling without us even having to think about it,” Vecchio says.

The company’s ability to cope with shifting regulation is helped by building platforms with AWS CodePipeline and AWS CloudFormation templates so they can be easily reused if it needs to shift to a different regional data center.

For instance, the recent decision by European regulators to end Privacy Shield—which covered data transfers to the United States—meant data had to be moved back to Europe. Using AWS, Audiencerate can easily shift storage locations to ensure it follows relevant rules. With Brazil and California mulling similar moves, the company will be able to react instantly if required.

Audiencerate credits AWS microservices with enabling it to keep a tight control of costs, despite its rapid growth.

When it started, Audiencerate was receiving 50 million requests a week from a handful of European countries. Now it is dealing with 1.5 billion requests a week from all around the world, generating more than 50 terabytes of data on Amazon S3 every month. It has scaled from 100 requests per second to 10,000 requests per second without extra infrastructure or configuration changes.

It uses Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and every microservice it adds or removes from the active platform has its own billing target so the company can keep track of every single component of the system.

Audiencerate is continuing to expand, integrating with new partners and data owners. The company is also working to develop a cookie-less targeting solution, and an identity resolution offeringin order to join up multiple sources of data. This will provide better data targeting without relying on cookies.It is also looking at better ways to see the performance of its whole platform, including AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.