Fringe81, a Tokyo-based software development and Data Management Platform (DMP) company, faced a major challenge in scaling their business without scaling their infrastructure costs. As the data size of the user profile store in their DMP increased, they needed to examine how to grow their business while watching the bottom line, especially their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
They had used memcached and Amazon DynamoDB, but their needs to reliably and cost-effectively scale were limited with these other systems. In their search for a solution, Fringe81 looked for alternative solutions that could provide ACID reliability, handle high performance writes and gave them maintainability and stability. Aerospike turned out to be the answer.
Yuzuru Tanaka, president of Fringe81, explained their application, “We use Aerospike to store user profiles including clickstreams using Large Lists. This allows us to analyze more data in real-time, make the most accurate decision and place the most relevant ad in front of a user.”
The result of their work to capture user behavior history was implemented as the ListFinder feature of Humpty, Fringe81’s smart-buying-tool. This feature allows better user categorization for re-targeting in a real-time manner. This reduced to moments what used to take hours or even a day to do using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) for analytics. Fringe81 can now rapidly capture and immediately act on a user’s interests, needs and desires.
With Aerospike on AWS, infrastructure costs scale linearly as data grows and costs can be easily and reliably estimated ahead of time. Aerospike Large Lists provided a flexible data structure for storing and understanding user behavior. The capability resulted in a simpler and more scalable application and Aerospike dramatically reduced the number of servers Fringe81 had to maintain, improving their TCO.
Even more, Aerospike relieved the pressure on Fringe81’s engineering team by transitioning away from less-scalable technology. According to Fringe81, “Aerospike is fast, helps us scale and has been simple to maintain. More important, Aerospike is stable and the peace of mind it gives us is priceless.” ROI on their new ListFinder functionality was estimated at well over 300%.
