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Why hybrid cloud is the new black for an ad tech company

Global ad tech company Amobee partners with Platform9 and OpenStack.

January 18, 2018
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Amobee is a global marketing technology company whose work includes real‐time bidding for advertising and collaborating with partners in the ad industry for collecting advertising data.

Based in Redwood City, California but with offices stretching from Silicon Valley to Singapore, their client portfolio includes Adidas, Skype and Porsche. Behind all the data crunching – including things like lists of the most-anticipated movies and talked-about TV shows — sits a hybrid environment with both cloud services and physical infrastructure in multiple data centers.

Eric Lakich, director of Amobee’s systems engineering team, says they partnered with Platform9 to move to OpenStack won over by benefits on offer.

“It’s really agile and flexible and we wanted to be able to get that same agile process on our own hardware, while maximizing efficiency,” Lakich says in a case study. “We have a lot of places where we might have a really powerful server running a small application. There was a lot of over-provisioning.”

Now they’re using Platform9’s offerings to break those servers into smaller parts and use VMs to run smaller applications more efficiently. Applications deploy by virtualization, containerization or bare metal; they’re currently using bare metal for software technologies with high machine utilization and heavy resource requirements of compute, memory and network functions.

Lakich says most of the heavy lifting in the migration process was done in the planning phase, since it was the first time Amobee had ever done it.

“We had moved OpenStack around a little bit in our infrastructure and were looking for applications that were a good fit – horizontally scaled, not a lot of hardware‐sticky requirements like persistent storage, etc. Once we identified those applications, the actual migrations were completed within a week, so it was fairly quick.” A couple of UI issues cropped up but were quickly solved, he adds.

Check out the complete case study here and read more about Platform9 in this Superuser profile.

 

Cover photo: Courtesy Amobee

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