Category Archives: Architecture

A Hadoop Success Story: Horizontally Scaling Our Data Pipeline

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Jessica

With 2000% growth in 2011, a data pipeline bursting at the seams, and 24/7/365 uptime, AppNexus engineers faced a task likened to changing the engine of a 747 in midflight. In order to horizontally scale the pipeline and data reporting, … Continue reading →

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Intern Series: Diary of an Ad Server Intern

Posted on December 4, 2012 by John the Intern

These days, the guys and gals on the data pipeline team find themselves in an interesting position: wrangling 20TB of billing data and records into databases and data warehouses every single day. Our optimization team couldn’t be more pleased: the … Continue reading →

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Ad-ing Value: How to value tens of millions of ad opportunities per hour

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Steve

[Editor's note: Be sure to catch Steve presenting "Rapid Iteration with Python: Scaling AppNexus" with Dave Himrod at PyData NYC on October 26, 2012] AppNexus serves nearly 10 billion ads per day. On average our ad servers serve over 100k … Continue reading →

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Surge 2012: Pete Emerson presents “Load Balancers at High Scale: A Disappearing Act”

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jessica

Pete Emerson, our Director of Tech Operations, spoke at Surge Conference 2012.  He discussed our scale engineering challenges and solutions to a crowd of 400 technologists and engineers. Pete’s presentation walks through the costs and benefits of using load balancers versus … Continue reading →

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Project Hydra – Scaling an API Globally



Posted on April 10, 2012 by Larry

At AppNexus we provide our clients with a RESTful API that allows people to manage all of their data in our adserving echosystem.  The API is built on a LAMP stack with memcache sprinkled in to help out with session … Continue reading →

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