AWS Architecture Case Study:

Real-Time Bidding

Tom Maddox, Solutions Architect

Who am I?

• Gardener (Capacity Planning)

• Motorcyclist (Agility)

• Mobile App Writer

• Problem Solver

• Technology Geek

• Solutions Architect

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 be challenging at any

scale.

AdRoll

AdRoll 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.”

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-TimeBidding

Regional Hub

Regional HubRegional 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

Amazon Kinesis StreamsManaged service for streaming ingest & processing

Sending Consuming

HTTP Post

AWS SDK

LOG4J

Flume

Fluentd

Get* APIs

Kinesis Client Library+

Connector Library

Apache Storm

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

AWS Mobile SDK

Deep Dive: Click Stream Ingest

• Role: Collect and aggregate click stream data

from audience interactions.

• Usage: Interactions with audiences are

offloaded to a Kinesis Stream or Kinesis

Firehose. Records are persisted to Amazon

S3.

• Services: Elastic Beanstalk, Kinesis, Lambda,

S3

Amazon Kinesis FirehoseLoad massive volumes of streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift

• Zero administration: Capture and deliver streaming data into S3, Redshift, and

other destinations without writing an application or managing infrastructure.

• Direct-to-data store integration: Batch, compress, and encrypt streaming data

for delivery into data destinations in as little as 60 secs using simple configurations.

• Seamless elasticity: Seamlessly scales to match data throughput w/o intervention

Capture and submit streaming data to Firehose

Firehose loads streaming data continuously into S3 and Redshift

Analyze streaming data using your favorite BI tools

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 data

from around the world, update user

profiles, 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

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.