Source: martechcube.com | Original coverage published December 2019.
OpenX Becomes First Major Ad Exchange to Go Fully Cloud-Native
OpenX announced that by Q3 2019 it had completed the full migration of the OpenX Exchange onto Google Cloud Platform (GCP), moving every workload off on-premise servers. The company positioned the move as making it one of the fastest and most scalable ad exchanges in the industry, while also future-proofing its technology stack against the limitations of legacy infrastructure.
Paul T. Ryan, CTO of OpenX, commented on the significance of the shift:
“Moving our technology to GCP has given OpenX a tangible leg up in the advertising technology ecosystem. We are now able to stop worrying about legacy infrastructure and focus more on our growth categories. We’ve been able to launch new regions of the world in a matter of days, and we’ve been able to tap into machine learning and AI tools that allow us to analyze and process data in ways we weren’t able to before. Our tech stack is getting smarter and more sophisticated by the day, and we have the flexibility to scale our infrastructure in real-time as the business scales and evolves.”
— Paul T. Ryan, CTO, OpenX
Key Benefits Reported Since Moving to GCP
Beyond core infrastructure improvements, OpenX reported four concrete operational changes resulting from the migration:
1. Rapid International Expansion
Provisioning on-premise infrastructure for a new geographic region previously required several months of setup work. By adopting GCP and implementing infrastructure as code (IaC), OpenX reduced that timeline to a matter of days. As an early example, the company expanded into Singapore and Southeast Asia and built all local technology elements directly on the cloud.
2. Workforce Reallocation
More than one quarter of OpenX’s technology workforce had previously been occupied with server maintenance and legacy infrastructure management. After the migration, those engineers were redirected to higher-value work, including development of the company’s people-based marketing platform, OpenAudience, and new product development on the core exchange.
3. Continuous Delivery at Scale
With the core exchange running natively on GCP and significant investment in CI/CD pipelines, OpenX gained the ability to ship code changes in near real time—a capability that was not achievable on the previous on-premise infrastructure.
4. Machine Learning and AI Integration
Access to Google Cloud’s managed machine learning and AI tooling allowed OpenX to analyze inventory and data usage at a more granular level, providing new visibility into technology costs and return on investment.
Google Cloud’s Perspective
“OpenX now operates completely in the public cloud, leveraging Google Cloud’s secure, high performance infrastructure and machine learning capabilities to optimize bidding, improve ad targeting and reduce spam in near real time. Importantly, they’ve also created a tech stack that will sustain high-velocity and new growth well into the future.”
— Will Grannis, Founder and Leader, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud
A detailed case study covering the OpenX and GCP integration was made available on the Google Cloud website at the time of the announcement.
Why This Migration Matters for DevOps Teams
The OpenX migration illustrates several patterns that are broadly applicable to engineering teams considering large-scale cloud migrations:
- Infrastructure as Code reduces geographic expansion friction. Codifying infrastructure configuration means replicating an environment in a new region becomes a deployment pipeline run, not a months-long provisioning project.
- Cloud migration can free engineering capacity. Teams spending significant time on hardware maintenance are candidates for reallocation once that burden moves to a managed cloud provider.
- CI/CD velocity is constrained by infrastructure, not just tooling. On-premise environments with manual release processes create deployment ceilings that cloud-native architectures can remove.
- Managed ML services lower the barrier to production AI. Rather than building and maintaining bespoke ML infrastructure, teams can consume Google Cloud’s services directly, reducing time-to-value for data-driven features.
About OpenX
OpenX operates a programmatic advertising exchange, aggregating and valuing consumer interest in real time to connect brands with relevant audiences across connected screens and ad formats. At the time of this announcement, the company served more than 30,000 brands, more than 1,200 publishers, and more than 2,000 premium mobile apps.