Case Study: Sharethrough achieves a scalable, low-latency native ad platform with Akka

Sharethrough chooses Scala to build industry's first native ad management system

Sharethrough is a native advertising platform that builds in‑feed ad placements to integrate brand content seamlessly into websites and mobile. After outgrowing a monolithic Ruby on Rails app and a third‑party ad server, they needed to build their own ad server with advanced targeting, templating and analytics while meeting strict low‑latency and scalability goals (targeting 99% of transactions under 50 ms) and enabling rapid iteration.

They rebuilt the service layer on the JVM using Scala and the Typesafe stack—Finagle for the front‑end ad server, Play/Finagle for backend services, and Akka for background processing—organized as small, single‑concern services. The result is a service‑oriented platform that handles thousands of requests per second, achieves sub‑50 ms 99th‑percentile latency, accelerates development, and scales efficiently.

Sharethrough