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Founded in 2013, Aniview has expanded rapidly, managing more than 100 billion video events a day from offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Los Angeles. As Aniview’s platform grew, so did the strain on its servers, and by 2016, the company began looking for ways to continue working at scale while also maintaining low latency for clients. It needed to redesign its data warehousing architecture. To do that, the company turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Aniview’s unique video ecosystem provides customers with a powerful combination of video player, ad management, and a marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers. Delivering an all-encompassing solution as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool requires Aniview to handle huge amounts of data at speed, without affecting its products’ performance. By late 2016, Aniview was handling petabytes of data and database queries on its existing cloud infrastructure, which was starting to slow down due to the sheer scale of operations. In a competitive market with tight margins, Aniview needed a way to scale up the company’s data handling solution while keeping costs to a minimum.
“We have to process, aggregate, and explore petabytes of data to provide insight for our customers about how their ads are performing and how they can improve,” says Roy Cohen, CTO at Aniview. “With limited resources in a competitive industry, this is very challenging. We had to think outside the box, so we looked at Google Cloud Platform.”
After testing different solutions, Aniview chose GCP because of its cost, performance, and ease of use. Google BigQuery in particular performed well in benchmark tests against other data products. “We found it had the most robust solution for our needs,” says Roy. With such a crucial part of its business at stake, the company worked carefully with Google to help ensure that there was no disruption to existing operations during the transition. Placing Google BigQuery at the heart of the new solution, Anivew created a highly scalable, serverless data analytics approach that, when combined with the networking power of GCP, could run massive queries with ease. Google App Engine provided a scalable core for the new architecture while Google Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Dataproc simplified Aniview’s enormous data processing tasks.
“Google BigQuery allows us to ingest any amount of data seamlessly,” says Roy. “It has given us a way to explore data we’d never been able to digest before and offer new services to our clients.”
Google BigQuery helped Aniview to completely transform its data analytics offering. Thanks to Google’s competitive pricing and low maintenance, Aniview reduced its data platform costs by more than 70%, when compared to the costs of its previous solution. Google’s serverless environment and ability to scale meant that Anivew could ramp up its compute power as needed and query huge datasets in just seconds, which was a heavy reduction compared to the previous data platform. Aniview’s new data platform was so powerful that it could now provide real-time performance metrics and analyze past data on an unprecedented scale, generating new insights that simply weren’t possible before.
“We wanted to explore three months of data with more than 20 dimensions. An aggregated report would generate tens of billions of rows,” says Roy. “Before, we couldn’t even probe this kind of data, but now we can query it very quickly.”
The ease of use of Google BigQuery also means that Aniview has been able to distribute some of its raw performance data to clients, and help them create custom tools for themselves. In addition to the cost savings, performance gains, and promise of new insights, GCP has helped Aniview concentrate on doing what it does best.
“Before, it was the database that managed us,” says Roy. “Now, with GCP, we manage the database. It’s allowed us to focus on our products and deliver the best solutions to our customers.”
With the migration completed, Aniview is keen to explore new ways of enhancing its products with Google solutions. The Google suite of machine learning tools, in particular, could help to automate some of the company’s processes and help its systems to react dynamically to changing conditions, rather than relying a set of programmed rules. As Aniview continues to grow and improve its services, the company can rely on Google to keep evolving and provide the platform it needs for the future.
“It’s great to see how much Google Cloud Platform has added over the past few years,” says Roy. “The tools are intuitive and the work is very professional; the platform is excellent.”
