Skai (formerly Kenshoo) is an ad-tech company that provides a suite of data-driven products for market intelligence, omnichannel media activation, testing and measurement. This results in actionable intelligence that enables brands and agencies to make predictions, improve strategic planning and drive growth on the most important customer channels. Skai operates globally in the US, EMEA, APAC and more. Its customers come from various segments, including retail, FSI, automotive, travel and more.
Skai used a data center containing thousands of servers based on bare-metal, VMware and OpenStack. This created business challenges, most notably a long onboarding time for new customers and extremely slow response times, with a price challenge, ongoing maintenance, scaling, management, and automation that consumed significant resources.
Skai and Automat-it built an experienced DevOps team that would optimize the benefits of migrating to AWS, while verifying that best practices were followed. The team modernized infrastructure deployment by utilizing AWS-managed services such as DynamoDB, EventBridge, S3 and, most significantly, Keyspaces to replace large Apache Cassandra clusters. Some applications were converted to run on Lambda functions instead of VMs to improve performance, reduce costs and enable higher scalability and flexibility in deployment. The solution was delivered using IaC (Pulumi).
The migration was a great success from both a business and technical perspective. Customers-wise, scalability issues were solved, onboarding time was reduced, and customer experience greatly improved. Technical KPIs also improved, and costs were reduced. All this contributed to Skai’s selection in 2022 as the best overall ad-tech solution. Post the successful mutual work, a dedicated team of Automat-it’s DevOps developers continues to work fully with Skai, allowing Skai to focus on their core business.
Benefits
- Unlimited scalability – no more limits on adding customers and scaling up customers.
- Customer onboarding time was reduced from 8h to 30m – customers can be onboarded immediately without waiting for the purchase to go through.
- Greatly improved customer experience.
- Reduced costs.
- UI speed increased by a factor of 2.5.
- Backend speed increased by a factor of 4.
- Events processing capacity increased by a factor of 4.5.
- High availability – survivability is now 3 times better than before.
- Improved maintainability and operability.
