AWS Architecture Case Study:

Real-Time Bidding

Tom Maddox – AWS Solutions Architect

Who am I?

• Gardener (Capacity Planning)

• Motorcyclist (Agility)

• Mobile App Writer

• Problem Solver

• Technology Geek

• Solutions Architect

• Intentional Generalist

Agenda

• What Is Real-Time Bidding (RTB)?

• Architectural Challenges

• Architecture Deep Dive– DynamoDB Streams

– Big Data Transformation and Analysis Tools

– Machine Learning

What is Real-Time Bidding?

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is a service offered by

advertising networks to agencies. The agencies

decide on the value of advertising opportunities in

real-time and bid accordingly on behalf of their

advertising clients. Typically the window of

opportunity for bids to be calculated from provided

consumer details (e.g. cookies) and then

submitted is 100ms.

The 100ms Handshake

Real Estate

Owner

• Websites

• Mobile Apps

• Video

Streaming

Advertising

Agency

• Logged in with…

• Referred by…• Location

• Historic user

profiles

• Active

Campaigns

• Content Management

• Billing

• Campaign

Management• Keywords• Interests

Why is it interesting?

• Most agencies want to maximize their campaign audiences by responding to advertising opportunities all over the world.

• Responses based on data driven, calculated decisions are important to yield value to campaigns.

• Consistently bidding on global opportunities in under 100ms can bechallenging at any scale.

AdRollAdRoll is a global leader in retargeting with more than 10,000 active

advertisers across over 100 countries.

AdRoll store 1.5 PB of data in Amazon S3 and run just 30 core Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Additional

instances—anywhere from 200 to 1,000 of them, including Amazon EC2 Spot Instances—are used for variable capacity.

“We need high performance, but we need more than that,” says Valentino Volonghi, CTO. “We need flexibility, and we need software that could scale across multiple data centers and machines, software we could optimize as we go. Moving our operations to the cloud was

really our only option.”

S

SocialVibe

SocialVibe has built a global business that handles peaks in its traffic using Amazon DynamoDB and multiple

Availability Zones across different Regions. Using AWS has enabled SocialVibe to experiment with new architectures to meet the demands of a diverse worldwide customer base.

“We had to order hardware in advance, we couldn’t experiment with new hardware easily,” explains Joshua

Rangsikitpho, CTO. “once we moved over to AWS all those problems went away”

On to the architecture…

Architecture Overview

Click Stream

Ingest

Real-Time

Bidding

Regional Hub

Regional Hub

Regional Hubs

Big Data Processing(Billing, Profile Tracking, Machine

Learning)

Campaign

Mgmt

Architecture Overview

Flyby Comments

• This architecture focuses on bidding logic. We’re not going to look closely at content management or serving.

• There is a split between time sensitivity. Bidding is done as fast as possible, but clickstream data can be buffered to update data for bidding decisions.

• Long range connectivity can be error prone. We’re leveraging AWS managed, resilient replication techniques wherever possible.

Deep Dive: Campaign Management

Deep Dive: Campaign Management

• Role: Management and monitoring of advertising campaigns.

• Usage: Marketing departments and advertising agencies log into a marketing portal to define campaigns and monitor dashboards.

• Top Tip: campaign managers can optimize target audiences in real-time, based on ongoing success.

• Services: Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancers, EC2 Instances, RDS

Deep Dive: Click Stream Ingest

Real-time processing

High throughput; elastic

Easy to use

S3, Redshift, DynamoDB Integrations

Amazon

Kinesis

Data Sources

App.4

[Machine Learning]

AW

S En

dp

oin

t

App.1

[Aggregate & De-Duplicate]

Data Sources

Data Sources

Data Sources

App.2

[Metric Extraction]

S3

DynamoDB

Redshift

App.3[Sliding

Window Analysis]

Data Sources

Availability Zone

Shard 1Shard 2Shard N

Availability Zone

Availability Zone

Introducing Amazon KinesisManaged Service for Real-Time Processing of Big Data

Kinesis

Deep Dive: Click Stream Ingest

• Role: Collect and aggregate click stream data from audience interactions.

• Usage: Interactions with audiences are recorded in a DynamoDB table. Streams and Lambda batch the content into S3 objects.

• Services: Elastic Beanstalk, DynamoDB with Streams, Lambda, S3

Deep Dive: Big Data Processing

S3 Cross Region ReplicationReplication of data across AWS regions reliably

• All new uploads into source bucket will be

replicated

• Asynchronous

• Entire bucket or prefixes

• Versioning required

Deep Dive: Big Data Processing

• Role: Consolidate clickstream datafrom around the world, update userprofiles, KPI’s and client invoices.

• Usage: S3 bucket replication is used to bring regional data together. Then AWS analytics services transform the data to derive insights. Updated user profiles and bidding tactics are distributed with the DynamoDB replication client.

• Top Tip: Faster analysis can lead to better return on investment. Leveraging Spot Instances can maximize this optimization opportunity.

• Services: S3 bucket replication, Data Pipeline, EMR, Redshift, Machine Learning, Kinesis, DynamoDB Replication Client, Spot Market.

Don’t lock your big data

pipeline down.Keep it agile and experiment often!

Deep Dive: Real-Time Bidding

Optimized Connectivity

• Many advertising exchanges already use AWS.

• Enquire into low latency connectivity options

such as VPC peering.

• If not, consider Direct Connect as a means to

get best possible latency from AWS to anyone.

Deep Dive: Real-Time Bidding

• Role: Respond to advertising opportunities with bids based on

campaign and user data in under 100ms.

• Usage: An API responds to opportunities in real-time using in-memory caches and

cross-region replication.

• Services: Elastic Beanstalk, ElastiCache,

RDS and DynamoDB

What are DynamoDB Streams?A stream of updates that scales with your table

Asynchronous

Exactly once

Strictly ordered records

i=Ai=B

i=C

i=C

Cross region replication

post

Architecture Overview

Summary

• Use regional hubs to minimize latency.

• Leverage asynchronous cross-region replication to keep regional hubs in sync, in real-time.

• Use event driven workloads that remain responsive at any scale.

• Many exchanges already use AWS, so enquire about optimized connectivity.

• Let us manage moving data around, so that you can concentrate on finding new insights from your data.

Further Challenges

• How could we make sure a campaign budget is

never exceeded?

• What’s the best way to manage and serve

advert content too?

Call to Action

1. Come to us and tell us more about your AdTech

use cases and what your priorities are.

2. We a building an AdTech community for AWS

customers to get early preview of products and

collaborate with us.

3. We are looking for cool and popular AdTech

blog ideas and for customers to tell their story.

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