Building Place Exchange: Handling Over Ten Thousand Digital Street-Side Screens
summary
Place Exchange runs programmatic ads to over ten thousand street‑side screens using serverless on AWS: API Gateway frontends, hundreds of Lambda functions, Kinesis streams for async logging, Glue + Athena over Parquet (with JSON fallback), and Datadog for observability. Client libraries normalize diverse IoT screens into an internal PX model and translate to OpenRTB; creative approval includes a human step. Engineering faces concrete limits—50 MB zipped lambda artifacts, 512 MB /tmp workarounds, 15‑minute lifetimes, Kinesis shard throttles—and uses DynamoDB caching and the distribution metrics API to mitigate them.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to ad exchange
- 3:33Normalization and integration
- 5:57Handling fragmented inventory
- 11:27Ad request architecture
- 19:01Observability and metrics
- 24:33Engineering constraints
- 38:21Key takeaways and conclusion
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