Case Study: AppNexus achieves real-time, millisecond ad bidding at massive scale with Aerospike

AppNexus - Customer Case Study

AppNexus, a leading independent real-time ad-technology platform, needed to make bidding and targeting decisions in milliseconds while tracking billions of cookies and handling millions of auctions per second. Faced with exponential data growth, strict latency requirements, and rising infrastructure costs, the company needed a database that could deliver both RAM-like speed and massive, cost-effective scale under heavy mixed read/write loads.

AppNexus deployed Aerospike’s flash-optimized NoSQL database on SSDs with a hybrid RAM/SSD architecture and global replication. The result was dramatic: 99% of reads under 1 ms, consistent low latency with 50/50 read-write traffic, ad delivery under 50 ms, throughput into the millions of ops/sec, an 80%+ improvement in hardware efficiency, and a substantially lower total cost of ownership—enabling reliable, real-time ad serving at scale.

AppNexus

Timothy G Smith

Senior Vice President Technical Operations