Category Archives: Back-end Feature

A Hadoop Success Story: Horizontally Scaling Our Data Pipeline

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

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

[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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Project Hydra – Scaling an API Globally



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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Metrics Collection and Display via Graphite

At AppNexus the production adserving component of our business has over 600 servers (a combination of virtual and baremetal) spread across 4 datacenters (AMS1 in Amsterdam, NYM1 and NYM2 in New York, and LAX1 in Los Angeles). We aggregate metrics from all … Continue reading

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