Running a large-scale ad-serving infrastructure presents unique challenges when balancing tenant isolation with operational efficiency. Our infrastructure handles millions of requests per second and generates billions of dollars in annual advertising revenue, serving ads across multiple properties and systems.
The cellular architecture problem
Earlier, we had a cellular architecture where we allocated each AWS account with Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to a given tenant. This approach provided accurate isolation but created the following significant operational challenges.
- The scale problem: Supporting only 18 clients across four AWS Regions requires 181 separate targets. Our team configured dedicated AWS accounts, VPCs, load balancers, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, and downstream service connections for each client.
- The efficiency problem: Our servers spent more than…