Making the internet a better place: Scaling AppNexus

Location:

Grand Ballroom - Salon D

Track:

Architectures You've Always Wondered about

Abstract:

Our mission is to make the internet a better place. We help content producers like news, social, and gaming sites monetize better, and we help users discover new products and services. In order to achieve this goal, our entire business depends on data, reliability, and speed. The past three years weve experienced 'hold on for dear life!' growth, and this presentation will give an uncensored dive into our architecture and lessons weve learned along the way. In particular, well dig into the buy vs build connundrum, with a focus on: Our data pipeline and our transition from out of the box to the horizontally scalable Hadoop; our load balancer-free DNS architecture built in GSLB and Keepalived; our real-time data streaming infrastructure, built primarily in C and processing 30 terabytes of data every day.

Mike Nolet

Mike oversees the Engineering and Technical Operations teams, having helped design the AppNexus system that handles over 12 billion ad requests a day. Prior to founding AppNexus, Mike was Director of Analytics and Product Manager at Right Media (acquired by Yahoo! for $850MM in July 2007), where he designed and managed key applications, including predictive optimization, inventory forecasting, and Media Guard, which protects publishers from harmful or unwanted ad content. Mike's deep understanding of the intersection between business needs and technology innovation began at 15, when he sold his first software application, and continued at Princeton University, where he studied Economics. On his popular blog, MikeOnAds, Mike analyzes the fast-changing display ad management and buying space, and the dynamic interplay between ad networks, ad exchanges, real-time bidding and the entire ecosystem.