Case Study: Tapad achieves real-time, low-latency cross-screen advertising at scale with Typesafe's Akka

Why Tapad chose the Typesafe Platform

Tapad is a market leader in cross-screen advertising that needed to correlate user behavior across smartphones, tablets, computers and other devices in real time. The challenge was building a low-latency, high-throughput system able to process massive data (hundreds of billions of events) with millisecond SLAs and heavy concurrency to make instant bidding and targeting decisions.

Tapad built its backend on the Typesafe Platform using Scala and Akka (running on the JVM), combined with Kafka, Aerospike, Redis, Vertica/Hadoop and other components; Play is used for the front end. The actor model and Scala’s expressiveness enabled fast, maintainable development—an MVP was live in months with two engineers, and the team has scaled while keeping latency and concurrency goals. Results include improved developer productivity, easier maintainability, and a production system that meets Tapad’s real-time bidding and cross-device targeting needs.

Tapad

Dag Liodden

Co-Founder and CTO