Case Study: Kixer achieves sub-millisecond, billion-event analytics scale with Citus Data

Kixer Uses Citus To Manage Analytics for Web Publishers and Internal Business Teams

Kixer is an ad-tech platform that connects mobile app developers (clients like Amazon and Credit Karma) with premium content publishers (including LA Times, Daily Mail, Fox Sports) to drive app installs. As their analytics became critical for publishers and internal teams—ingesting over a billion events and a terabyte of data per day with up to 100 concurrent users—Kixer outgrew a single Amazon RDS Postgres instance and needed a reliable, scalable system of record to support finance, monitoring, and real-time reports.

Kixer migrated analytics to Citus (keeping Postgres compatibility) and integrated it with their Spark pipeline using an open-source Spark partitioner. The move delivered linear write scaling, sustained peak reads of ~3,000/sec, storage of tables with several billion rows, and most queries returning in ~1 ms. The switch also improved availability—allowing a rapid production cutover with minimal downtime and no data loss—and enabled faster, more detailed analytics for customers.

Kixer

Cody Koeninger

Chief Architect