Beeswax Uses AWS to Cost-Effectively Process Millions of Bid Requests per Second

Beeswax is a fully managed real-time bidding (RTB) platform, built on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, that gives advertisers control and transparency over buying advertising programmatically. The company’s Bidder-as-a-Service platform fields millions of queries per second and consumes 125 GB of data per minute.

In this session from re:Invent 2017, Ram Kumar Rengaswamy, co-founder and CTO of Beeswax, explains how the company runs its RTB platform on AWS and shares best practices for performance and cost-efficiency at low-latency and high throughput. “We leverage [AWS] managed services to do all of the heavy lifting so that we can focus on building our product,” says Rengaswamy. A typical RTB platform needs to scale up to millions of queries per second to find audiences for targeting advertising. “Having a good load balancer is an indispensable part of your overall stack to ensure load is distributed across your pool of machines,” says Rengaswamy. “We chose [Amazon] Network Load Balancer because it’s extremely fast and low-latency.”

For its low-latency user profile data store, Beeswax uses Aerospike running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I3en instances with NVMe SSD drives to offer tail-read latency of two milliseconds. “[I3en instances] offer high performance at a fraction of cost,” says Rengaswamy. “So now it’s OK to do reads at serving time because the SSDs are able to handle the high throughput and low latency requirements.” Beeswax syncs its real-time bidding services for budgeting, conversion tracking, cookie-matching, and user-profile data stores across regions using Amazon Transit VPC.

To reduce costs, Beeswax sets CPU thresholds with Amazon CloudWatch to trigger Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. Beeswax also uses Amazon EC2 Spot instances to reduce costs on compute instances for its bidding platform. “If there’s one thing from this talk you should take away, it’s to go check out [Amazon] EC2 Spot,” Rengaswamy says. “If you care about operating costs, Spot is going to save you a ton of money.”

To learn more about AWS for Advertising & Marketing, visit aws.amazon.com/advertising-marketing.