Case Study: AdGear achieves faster, more reliable ad bidding and halves hardware needs with ScyllaDB

AdGear Turns to Scylla to Power Its Ad Serving Platform

AdGear, a Canadian ad-serving platform that performs about 1,000,000 bids per second, was struggling with read-latency spikes from a 31-node Cassandra cluster across three data centers — a critical problem because they have only 10–15 ms to fetch user profiles and participate in auctions. To solve this, AdGear turned to ScyllaDB, using ScyllaDB’s Cassandra-compatible database so they could migrate without rewriting their stack.

After switching to ScyllaDB, AdGear halved their hardware footprint (moving from 31 Cassandra nodes to 13 ScyllaDB nodes) while each ScyllaDB node handled more than twice the queries; peak effective read latency dropped from 21 ms to 13 ms and latency became far more stable. Time-outs (missed bids) fell dramatically — from roughly one in seven requests failing under Cassandra to being able to bid 95% of the time with ScyllaDB — and bulk inserts and client-side code were simplified, producing both performance and cost benefits.

AdGear

David Haguenauer

Software Engineer