Cutting infrastructure costs by 20x times for a programmatic ad marketplace with 1B audience reach

Client background

PowerLinks offers a real-time ad, creative-automation platform that delivers personalized messaging through various dynamic native advertising formats.

The PowerLinks solution works with both first- and third-party data to help advertisers improve their targeting and reach over a billion consumers and more than 400,000 sites and apps.

https://www.powerlinks.com/

Business Challenge

PowerLinks was looking to significantly cut infrastructure costs of their DSP and overcome solution limitations to enable further business growth.

PowerLinks had developed DSP for native and in-content advertising.
Over the years, their monthly infrastructure costs grew exponentially. Operating costs amounted to $200k per month. Overall the company spent close to $3.5M in two years on infrastructure alone.
Additionally, PowerLinks couldn’t onboard new clients due to solution limitations. Consequently, their business couldn’t grow.

Xenoss Solution

A meticulous technical audit, solution overhaul,
and infrastructure optimization

Conducted a thorough technical audit

The Xenoss team analyzed the solution to identify the problematic areas. Our audit revealed that the infrastructure wasn’t suited to the technical requirements of the solution. This meant the architecture was poorly optimized and an inadequate tech stack had been chosen.

Lowered operational costs with a complete solution redevelopment

After pinpointing the technical weaknesses and limitations, we a chose new, suitable tech stack and completely redeveloped the solution while preserving all the initial functionality. With the improved solution quality, we were able to decrease the server instances and make the architecture high-load tolerant. This resulted in much lower infrastructure costs.

Built a cloud-neutral architecture

One of the major issues for PowerLinks was the overuse of expensive Amazon Cloud Services. To remove this dependency, we built a cloud-neutral architecture, which is more efficient and flexible. Now, the solution has the choice of being deployed on Amazon, Azure, and VPS-based cloud servers.

Enabled minimum client supervision

We put together a small team of very senior developers and engineers that worked efficiently and independently, allowing the client to lessen their day-to-day involvement in development. As the Xenoss team worked on addressing technical issues, our client could focus on elevating sales and growing their business.

Results

REDUCED INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS

By 20x times

After Xenoss’ involvement, PowerLinks infrastructure costs dropped to $8k-10k per month from the previous $200k/month spend.

BUILT EFFICIENT IT ENVIRONMENT

From 450 servers to 10 servers

With the properly built architecture, we decreased the number of servers required from 450 to just 10.

INCREASED SCALABILITY

To 1 million QPS

The volume of inbound traffic went from 20 to 80 QPS with the possibility of scaling up to 1 million QPS.

FAST DEPLOYMENT

In 4 months

With time of the essence for PowerLinks, Xenoss successfully and efficiently completed the project in just 4 months.

TEAM CAPACITY

6 members

We put together a small team of exceptional senior developers, engineers, and one architect, all possessing impressive track records in AdTech.

OPTIMIZED

Tech stack

Rather than going with the old tech stack, we chose technologies more suitable for the product, which included JVM/Java, Aerospike, ClickHouse, base cloud services S3, EC2 and NGINX.

Client’s feedback

Before turning to Xenoss, we had a demand-side platform that was costly and not scalable. Having access to a wealth of experience on the Xenoss team related to our domain of real-time bidding, we’ve cut costs and now have a much more efficient, reliable DSP for our customers. I’d gladly recommend Xenoss as a technology partner. I’ve found the team to be very professional and diligent, ensuring that our needs and expectations are met through every step of the development process.

Ben Dzamba

VP Of Product Development at PowerLinks

Client background

Business Challenge

Xenoss Solution

Results

Client’s feedback

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