Some simply log in and make their own ads, others want complex integrations, some need completely bespoke functions. We are always on and always working on the next big feature. 2016 was a tremendous year for digital advertising with many reports stating that ad spend and revenue was up, and it’s an exciting challenge to be at the forefront of this industry.
Our ad delivery platform was designed and built from the ground up with two critical goals; super fast performance and total reliability. Careful selection of the most suitable technologies, best practice software engineering and solutions architectures enabled us to create a responsive and scalable solution.
We recently showcased just how fast users could build ads by boldly creating 480 ads in five minutes in a live demo during a competition pitch, winning Unilever’s Next Big Thing 2016. In terms of reliability, we’re very proud to say our outage record for 2016 is 99.995% uptime on the ad delivery platform.
Performance-wise, we use Nginx as our web server as it’s lean and mean with minimal overhead combined with our own Ad Delivery decision application engineered specifically to be simple and written with real-time processing optimisations as a main focus, all backstopped with MongoDB as our data persistence layer again due to its superior performance capabilities.
Reliability is achieved with our infrastructure, information, and software architecture views. We host multiple web servers, each with redundant power supplies and RAID 10 local storage, which are served by multiple redundant Load Balancers to manage the incoming traffic distribution. Data persistence is based upon a replicated dataset model with the data replicated to multiple nodes any of which can take over control should another node fail. Additionally, our software development, testing, and release processes validate change and mitigate risk going through multiple test environments prior to reaching the production estate.
All of our Ad Delivery infrastructure is held in a contemporary data centre with robust power, air, and cooling facilities, with onsite operational support and quality service level agreements in place. In order to ensure the best performance of our Ads globally we use a global proxy cache service offering local points of presence to minimise network latency of Ad content.
Creating, maintaining and developing a unique world class ad platform takes a strong team of software engineers constantly striving to develop the next big thing in digital advertising. It will never slow down and the only way to succeed is by having the mindset to always rise to the next challenge.