1. Real time bidding (RTB) refers to the practice of buying and selling display ad impressions through ad exchanges in real time and one impression at a time.
2. AWS is well suited for building RTB solutions due to its scalability, global infrastructure, and services that handle non-differentiated heavy lifting like networking and data processing.
3. Sample RTB architectures on AWS use Elastic Load Balancers and Auto Scaling Groups for front-end servers, DynamoDB and Redis for low latency caches, Kinesis and Spark for data collection and analytics, and EC2 Spot Instances to reduce costs. Building on AWS allows customers to focus on their competitive advantages rather than infrastructure.
The Role of Taxonomy and Ontology in Semantic Layers - Heather Hedden.pdf
Real Time Bidding on AWS - Pop-up Loft Tel Aviv
1. Real Time Bidding on AWS
Dmitri Tchikatilov
AdTech BD, AWS
dmitrit@amazon.com
2. Agenda
1. Goals and how AWS works with RTB clients
2. Observations and latest trends
3. Building RTB solution on AWS
4. Examples
3. RTB Definition
Real time bidding (RTB) refers to the practice of buying
and selling display ad impressions through ad exchanges
in real time and one impression at a time.
4. RTB Process Simplified
1. User goes to a
web page
2. Ad impression
is sent to an Ad
Exchange
3. Ad Exchange
invites bidders
4. Highest bidder
wins the
impression
5. Winning ad
creative is
delivered
5. Programmatic Market - US
RTB $11B, 74% in 2015
Low margin - efficient
operators have
advantage
Programmatic direct buy
is gaining market share
too
6. Global RTB Market
1. Traffic is traded in a few key locations
on AWS (e.g. us-east-1) and several
large exchanges outside AWS
2. Easy to start buying traffic globally –
roll out new AWS Regions (Korea,
China, India – TBD)
7. RTB Elasticity for Traffic Volume Changes
Traffic changes drastically predictable – daily, weekly, seasonal
Also unpredictable – large scale events (LSE) (Kim Kardashian)
9. What is the Desired Degree of Control?
RTB
Network
Engineer
10. Where is the Non Differentiated Heavy Lifting?
Customer
Manages
All-On Prem
RTB
colo with
Exchange S3,
Networking
EC2
S3,
Networking
EC2
S3,
Networking
EC2
ASG, ELB
DynamoDB
ASG, ELB
DynamoDB
Manage
Administer
Algo, ML
11. Networking
• Days of RTB customers owning AS numbers are gone...
• Large “legacy” colo display bidders and exchangers will
remain very relevant
• New RTBs and Exchanges (Mobile, Video) pick AWS
and grow successfully
• Simplified networking designs
• Optimization of EC2 for networking, latest HVM AMIs
single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
12. Front End Servers
• Most people use ELB, sometime run their own ELB (HA Proxy, NginX)
• Enable HTTP Persistent Connections (HTTP Keep-Alive)
• Developer feedback - older legacy bidders C/C++, Java, Erlang, newer
systems – Node.JS, Python, Scala
• Bidders are becoming more modular, dockerized
• When traffic grows, use ELBs and ASGs dedicated to individual
exchanges
• Single AZ deployments reduces the ELB latency by few ms.
• Custom application level metric(s) is/are computed and published to
CloudWatch, ASG works off that custom metric(s)
• Separating Bidding fleet from Exchange Listening (and not bidding)
13. Low Latency Caches
• Popular choices are: Aerospike, DynamoDB, Redis
• DynamoDB hash (userId) + range (audience segment)
partitions
• DynamoDB schemas considered to be a differentiator,
but we are looking to share some ideas and patters for
best practices (user profile store/cookie store - low
latency features for Machine Learning)
• Cross-region replication is becoming more common
(Streams + Lambda) moving away from Storm
14. Data Collection + Analytics
Data from bidders is moved to a streaming service
Apache Spark
Most popular choices are: Kinesis + Spark & Kafka +
Spark
Batching of the data on the bidder to improve
performance and economics
15. Example RTB – Cost Curve
Do I need co-
located bidders?
Do I need a
dedicated
networking team?
Do I need to own
networking
equipment?
$0
$100,000
$200,000
$300,000
$400,000
$500,000
$600,000
1 2 5 7 10
USD
Time (ms)
Monthly RTB Fleet Spend vs.
Roundrip Exchange Latency (ms)
16. Customer Perspective on RTB Solutions
Customers have very
different perspectives on
what their business
considers as competitive
advantage
What is your competitive
advantage?
What do you consider
shareable knowledge? Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3
More advanced
customers are
sharing more
and raising the
HL bar
HL
HL
HL
17. “We run the RTB platform on more than 2,500
machines, approximately eight hours a day globally, at
a cost of less than $0.05 per day per machine...”
“Because we’re running on AWS, we’re able to focus
95 percent of our staff on new product development.
Using AWS allows us to focus on innovating our
platform and solving customer problems.”
Valentino Volonghi, CTO AdRoll
Example: Enabling Real Time Bidding
Advertiser
Solutions
18. Example: RTB Data Collection
Improved speed (mins to secs), simplicity & cost reduction
Reducing data latency to seconds
Ingesting approximately 150TB daily
19. Reducing Costs Everywhere
The company has saved tens of thousands of dollars.
That’s between 20 and 30 percent of our total monthly
AWS bill.
Gal Aviv Research & Development Group Manager
• 100 RIs + 800 Spot Instances
• Partner – Spotinst
Check out EC2 Spot features – Spot Fleet API and Spot Bid Advisor
20. Solution Example: Ad Exchanges Outside AWS
20
Equinix
AdIX
AWS
Customer
Ad Exchange
Provider
Ad Exchange
Provider
Ad Exchange
Provider
Equinix
AdIX
Ad Exchange
Provider
Ad Exchange
Provider
Ad Exchange
Provider
Ashburn
New York
Partner provides:
Channel on NNI (<1GB) or
Dedicated port (>1GB)
Private
IP
Public IP
Public
IP
DX Partner
DX Partner
Reduce AWS traffic spend ~25%
Predictable latency (vs. Internet)
Reduced latency
21. AWS Regions as Centers of Gravity
Advertiser
Ad
Exchange
Ad
Network
Publisher
Ad
Network
Ad
Network
Ad
Network
Advertiser
Publisher
Reasons:
Low latency
Lower traffic costs
Large scale secure
B2B data sharing
High Growth in
Mobile
Video
Customers find their operating ranges they are comfortable with and make economic sense
More advanced customers are sharing more and elevating overall knowledge
You can see that in other industries too
NO Undifferentiated heavy lifting – Compare and contrast with traditional companies
A great example of stunning growth and success is a company from California called AdRoll. AdRoll is an Advertiser Solution Provider and global leader in retargeting with more than 10,000 active advertisers across over 100 countries. The company is razor focused on delivering new business functionality to their clients and leaving the heavy undifferentiated lifting to AWS. What sets this company apart is significant simplification of the infrastructure which is achieved through latest advancements in several AWS technologies. Good question to think about - how many people in your organization are focused on new product development vs. maintenance of the existing solutions?
Video (3 mins) https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/adroll/
Here is an example of large scale data ingest solution implemented by AdRoll
The key benefit is reducing data latency and insight from minutes to seconds. It implements a streaming service called Kinesis which received the data from multiple sources and makes it available for real time batch and real time applications.
Batching records to save $ in Kinesis
Removing large numbers of small files
Ingesting approximately 150TB daily
AdRoll Kinesis ingest
http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2015/06/26/kinesis.html
Digital advertising business is very complex. Business relationships and partnerships are formed and large amounts of data is being exchanged. Imagine what happens when a large group of companies from this ecosystem are placed together in the same AWS Region. We are talking not only about just Advertising companies but their customers – multi-national publishers like Conde Nast and Hearst and media companies like Dow Jones. It creates new opportunities to exchange data with low latency and securely collaborate on very large data sets.
We see signs of cloud based collaboration among the businesses – when AWS customers are motivating their clients to do business on AWS because of simplicity, agility and superior economics.