AppsFlyer: Large Scale NoSQL DB Migration Under Fire

Appsflyer is an ad tech. We’re a mobile attribution company. We help marketeers on mobile app advertisers to sell their apps to market their apps, to run campaigns. We measure how one campaign can excel comparing to the other.

Before we had Aerospike, we had a very big installed database, that was very unstable, was composed out of almost 50 instances. We ran on AWS, so hardware fails. The cluster was very unstable. (Couchbase) XDCR couldn’t keep up; daily backups took more than a day to accomplish, and we were not happy with support – is an understatement. We couldn’t get any proper help for instability issues. We were in constant fear that something will happen to this database.

The first step that made us move to Aerospike was actually, stability. Our first move with Aerospike was to replace our most mission critical database. It was the user installs database. We migrated around two billion records to a new Aerospike cluster, which was more stable, smaller, of course. After we finished the migration, we immediately moved to add new features that depend on it.

So we had a very high TCO on our former clusters, and it made us go looking for, to find other solutions. Once we found Aerospike, things got a lot cheaper. We saved around two thirds of our hardware costs.

The thing I like most in Aerospike is that it just works. And that’s not trivial.

– Ido Barkan, Software Architect, AppsFlyer