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Streaming· Case study 04

Real-time AdTech bidstream pipelines

Streaming and batch pipelines that ingest high-volume programmatic-advertising data (bid requests, wins, impressions, and auctions) into Apache Druid and ClickHouse for real-time analytics.

GBs/hr

of AdTech events into real-time dashboards

Architecture at a glance

  1. Scala intake
  2. Kafka
  3. Beam on Dataflow
  4. Druid / ClickHouse

01 The problem

AdTech platforms produce huge, bursty event streams across several cloud regions, and customers need them queryable within minutes, correct down to the deal ID.

02 What I built

  1. 1HTTP intake services in Scala that accept event data and publish to Apache Kafka.
  2. 2Streaming and batch pipelines on Apache Beam (Scio) running on Google Cloud Dataflow that parse OpenRTB-style payloads (impressions, PMP deals, creatives), then enrich and aggregate them.
  3. 3Batch ingestion from multi-region AWS S3 and GCS buckets, orchestrated by a central Apache Airflow service on Kubernetes.
  4. 4Store monitoring that tracks landed files and partitions, so late or missing data is detected automatically.
  5. 5Idempotent backfills and replay for failed windows, plus source-to-field lineage maps used to answer customer data questions quickly.

03 Impact

GBs per hour of AdTech events land in real-time dashboards, with a clear path from any dashboard number back to the raw field that produced it. The inherited legacy pipelines were stabilized and their deployment modernized along the way.

08 · Contact

Let’s build something that holds up in production.

If something here resonates, whether it’s a data problem, an idea, or a conversation worth having, I’d love to hear from you. The fastest way to reach me is a message on LinkedIn.

Good reasons to reach out

  • Data platform help

    ClickHouse or Druid performance, Kubernetes operations, migrations, and cost reviews.

  • Collaboration

    Open-source work, writing, talks, or comparing notes on a hard data problem.

  • Just to talk shop

    Real-time analytics, AdTech data, MCP and agent tooling, or life as an FDE.

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