Case Study: LiquidM achieves 100ms real-time bidding latency and rapid, cloud-like scaling with Leaseweb dedicated servers

LiquidM - Customer Case Study

LiquidM is a Berlin-based demand-side platform (DSP) that runs programmatic ad auctions at scale — processing about a million requests per second and meeting a 100-millisecond SLA. That real-time bidding workload created challenges around extreme low latency, budget pacing, click-fraud detection and aggregating millions of micro-transactions, which required geographically close, high‑performance infrastructure and a large number of CPU cores beyond typical cloud offerings.

To meet those needs LiquidM uses Leaseweb dedicated servers but treats them like a cloud: scripted provisioning, automated rescue boots, a DSL for disk layouts, and one‑line reinstall workflows. Their three‑DC Amsterdam setup (quorum and <80 km distance) provides resilient low-latency operations; moving to high‑core AMD machines cut rack count and costs (about 50% reduction) while improving performance, with order-to-production in ~48 hours. The tooling is open source and the team reports strong cost, performance and operational benefits.

LiquidM

Hagen Rother

Lead Architect and Head of IT