Inuxu Digital Media Technologies: Delivering a reliable advertising platform for higher consumer engagement
About Inuxu Digital Media Technologies
Inuxu Digital Media Technologies (Inuxu) is an Indian media tech company that has been offering various online advertising services since 2013. In 2017, Inuxu launched Adgebra, a digital adtech platform that connects advertisers and publishers to offer hyper targeted ads in 10+ Indian regional languages. As of June 2022, Adgebra's ads reach more than five hundred million unique users every month via its network of over 2,000 publisher partners.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Persistent
Persistent is a digital engineering and enterprise modernization company that's on a mission to give customers a unique competitive edge in the digital space. The Google Cloud partner delivers innovative cloud services, providing clients with fast, flexible, and scalable access to the cloud. Persistent also combines deep technical expertise and industry experience to help clients anticipate and answer questions before they're asked.
To enhance its service quality and meet increasing demand, Inuxu leverages the scalable and highly available cloud infrastructure of Google Cloud, delivering a reliable and high-performance digital advertising platform, while reducing maintenance workloads.
Google Cloud results
- Lowers failed access request rate from 40% to 1-2% with servers hosted on GKE
- Minimizes maintenance workloads with fully managed cloud services, freeing more workforce for product development
- Provides highly available databases and comprehensive backups in prevention of data loss through Cloud SQL
- Reduces ad serving time by half with Cloud CDN for higher ad clickthrough rate
Eliminates one downtime per week caused by scaling VMs
Advertising has always been an important revenue stream for publishers. This has not changed in the digital age. Now, online publishers are able to boost their ad revenues leveraging the latest technologies to enhance ad targeting and personalization to create more compelling content.
Inuxu Digital Media Technologies (Inuxu) was founded in 2013 to support online publishers in India and across the world. The media tech company started off with several online advertising services and later decided to consolidate its expertise into one single platform. In 2017, Inuxu launched Adgebra, a digital adtech system that connects advertisers and publishers to offer hyper targeted ads in more than 10 Indian regional languages for better ad personalization. In June 2022, Adgebra's ads reached more than five million unique users every month across more than 2,000 digital publishers.
"On our current cloud platform, we need to manage the services manually. Combined with the system load, scaling and upgrading our platform has become a challenge. Google Cloud provides a highly scalable and stable infrastructure that can better support our continuous growth."
—Akshay Adik, Head of Tech, Inuxu Digital Media TechnologiesBesides multiple ad targeting features, Adgebra stands out by running ads in various regional languages based on consumers' preferences. "This way, we're able to help brands build higher consumer engagement and execute better marketing campaigns while raising ad revenues for online publishers," says Neha Oza, Content and Marketing Manager at Inuxu.
With its one-of-a-kind service, Adgebra has quickly gained popularity, quadrupling its load in just five years. The Inuxu team realized that it needed a more powerful infrastructure to meet the growing demand and reduce maintenance workloads. For the platform to continue running smoothly, Inuxu needed to move Adgebra to a more scalable platform with automation capabilities. With the support of partner agency Persistent, Inuxu started migrating Adgebra to Google Cloud in February 2022 for greater system stability, and for its fully managed services.
"On our current cloud platform, we need to manage the services manually. Combined with the system load, scaling and upgrading our platform has become a challenge," explains Akshay Adik, Head of Tech at Inuxu. "Google Cloud provides a highly scalable and stable infrastructure that can better support our continuous growth."
Supporting easy and flexible scaling with VMs on Google Kubernetes Engine
Inuxu is in the midst of setting up virtual machines (VMs) on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to host the servers of Adgebra, which the company expects will help overcome the challenges of scaling its cloud infrastructure. On the cloud platform where Adgebra is currently deployed, the Inuxu team needs to stop certain VM clusters when scaling VMs, which leads to one system downtime per week. However, because new VMs can be launched and scaled without disrupting existing workloads on GKE, Adik expects that there should no longer be any downtime once Adgebra is fully migrated to Google Cloud.
"With its glitchless and flexible scaling features, scaling VMs on GKE is easy and will eventually enhance the stability and availability of our system. Currently, 40% of the access requests to our platform fail due to limited scalability because there is no available server. We expect the number to go down to about 1-2% when running our servers on GKE."
—Akshay Adik, Head of Tech, Inuxu Digital Media TechnologiesGKE also supports more flexible ways of adding computing resources by providing custom VMs and the possibility of separating object storage and processing engines of a VM cluster. This way, Inuxu will be able to timely scale up VMs according to its system's actual load, which is expected to increase its agility when the computing demand grows, and reduce operational costs. For example, for processing intensive workloads, the company can only scale the processing edge of a cluster without increasing object storage at the same time.
"With its glitchless and flexible scaling features, scaling VMs on GKE is easy and will eventually enhance the stability and availability of our system," says Adik. "Currently, 40% of the access requests to our platform fail due to limited scalability because there is no available server. We expect the number to go down to about 1-2% when running our servers on GKE."
Highly available databases ready for further integration
Since Adgebra relies heavily on data processing to distribute ads, generate reports and record transactions, having highly available and reliable databases is crucial to Inuxu's business. In December 2021, the databases of Adgebra were down for 16 hours due to a hardware failure. The existing cloud platform that Inuxu uses only provides fractional data backups, so the company needed to recover data manually, which took several weeks for partial data recovery. Adik says that the incident brought extended downtime, and there were services that had to go offline, putting the reliability of its service in question.
As the first step of its migration process, Inuxu is now moving its transaction data to Cloud SQL, reporting data to Dataproc, and other business data to MongoDB Atlas. The company will then look to aggregate all its data on Cloud SQL, in order to streamline its data processing workloads and facilitate the implementation of data analytics powered by artificial intelligence (AI) in the future. As Cloud SQL guarantees more than 99.95% availability and supports comprehensive data backups, Inuxu is convinced that its platform will not suffer from another data loss incident moving forward.
Working with experts in the field for seamless migration
Due to different parts involved in the migration process, Inuxu worked with Persistent to ensure a well-informed and strategic implementation. With expertise in tools like GKE, database technologies, and CI/CD migration, the Persistent team provided technical guidance with best practices, and also worked with the team by providing hands-on assistance throughout the implementation process.
"To understand our business needs better, the team at Persistent conducted a thorough assessment of the organization and identified the key objectives. Apart from that, they also did rigorous testing to minimize potential roadblocks to secure a seamless transition and minimize post-migration issues," says Adik.
From pre to post migration, Persistent ensured that the Inuxu team was prepared at every step of the way, providing continuous support and guidance to address any issues or challenges that arose. Post migration, engineers at Inuxu received training and knowledge transfer sessions that further empowered them with the skills and expertise needed to operate and manage the new solutions effectively.
"Persistent has been a Google Cloud partner for over a decade. We were uniquely positioned to help Inuxu map its migration journey to Google Cloud, working its intended business objectives back into a custom-built cloud strategy. This collaborative approach was key to understanding the pain points of Inuxu and addressing them through the right-fit Google Cloud tools and services," says Nirdesh Chahal, Vice President, Sales at Persistent Systems.
"I would describe our partnership as a very collaborative one, focused on achieving shared goals. There was regular communication and consultation, and we felt that our inputs were valued as the team allowed for adjustments and optimizations in areas we highlighted," shares Adik.
Reducing maintenance workloads with fully managed services
Besides system performance, another aspect that Inuxu hopes to improve with the new cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud is maintenance workload. As Google Cloud provides fully managed VM and database services, Inuxu's engineers will be able to invest their time currently spent on system maintenance and monitoring in product development. For example, GKE can automatically install software updates and run health checks on VMs, which are now manually done by the Inuxu team.
"With the fully managed services of Google Cloud, we'll be able to liberate our workforce from mundane maintenance work and focus more on improving our products," notes Adik. "Now, we need six engineers to manage and monitor our cloud infrastructure. We estimate that on Google Cloud, we'll only need two engineers to ensure smooth operation of our system."
Achieving higher clickthrough rates through shorter ad serving times on Cloud CDN
Inuxu has recently expanded its ad publishing service to several countries in the Middle East. On its existing cloud platform, all ad content is sent from one server hosted in Singapore, which is far away from the regions where the company operates, leading to less than ideal delivery speeds. To resolve this issue, Inuxu is adopting Cloud CDN to deliver ads from one of eight servers around the world, nearest to its end users. Adik anticipates that the move will reduce Adgebra's ad serving time from 200 to 100 milliseconds.
"For online advertising, there's a higher chance that consumers will click on an ad when the ad serving time is less than 100 milliseconds. With a faster content delivery speed supported by Cloud CDN, we'll be able to enhance the clickthrough rates of our ads, and help our publisher partners increase their ad revenues," he adds.
Leveraging AI technologies for advanced advertising services
After completing the migration to Google Cloud, Inuxu plans to leverage the broader capabilities of the new cloud infrastructure to expand its services. The faster content delivery speed supported by Cloud CDN will enable the company to offer more video ads to consumers, while the extensive global network of Google Cloud can help it enter foreign markets more easily. Furthermore, Inuxu will leverage AutoML to build an ad recommendation system and use Vision AI to filter inappropriate ad images.
"Moving to Google Cloud is not only about enhancing the scalability and reliability of our advertising platform. What's truly exciting is that after establishing our new cloud infrastructure, we can make full use of the top-notch technologies of Google Cloud like AI and global network, to continue expanding our services."
—Akshay Adik, Head of Tech, Inuxu Digital Media TechnologiesAdik says, "Moving to Google Cloud is not only about enhancing the scalability and reliability of our advertising platform. What's truly exciting is that after establishing our new cloud infrastructure, we can make full use of the top-notch technologies of Google Cloud like AI and global network, to continue expanding our services."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Inuxu Digital Media Technologies
Inuxu Digital Media Technologies (Inuxu) is an Indian media tech company that has been offering various online advertising services since 2013. In 2017, Inuxu launched Adgebra, a digital adtech platform that connects advertisers and publishers to offer hyper targeted ads in 10+ Indian regional languages. As of June 2022, Adgebra's ads reach more than five hundred million unique users every month via its network of over 2,000 publisher partners.
About Persistent
Persistent is a digital engineering and enterprise modernization company that's on a mission to give customers a unique competitive edge in the digital space. The Google Cloud partner delivers innovative cloud services, providing clients with fast, flexible, and scalable access to the cloud. Persistent also combines deep technical expertise and industry experience to help clients anticipate and answer questions before they're asked.