Case Study: Pixels achieves 70 million ad impressions per day with Amazon Web Services

Pixels - Customer Case Study

Pixels is a Hong Kong–based digital advertising company that serves targeted ads and measures campaign performance across smartphones, tablets, desktops, and connected TVs. Before moving to the cloud, Pixels ran a mix of collocated and leased servers serving about 7 million impressions per month, and its IT team spent excessive time on hardware management, bandwidth provisioning and troubleshooting—most notably an outage caused by faulty switches that took 18 hours to diagnose and cost nearly two days of service.

In September 2010 Pixels migrated to AWS, automating its stack with S3 and CloudFront for assets, EC2 Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for ad serving, RDS Multi‑AZ for databases, and Redshift plus EC2 workers for analytics. The move enabled rapid scaling to 70 million impressions per day, 99.8% availability, response times of 40–60 ms, faster time‑to‑market (analytics up in one month), lower operational headcount and costs, and improved analytics and fraud detection.

Pixels

Kevin Peterson

Head of Technology