NoBid’s migration from AWS to cost-effective cloud performance

NoBid, an ad-tech startup founded in 2019, connects publishers and advertisers through an advanced auction optimization platform (complete with a little bit of magic and “special sauce”). NoBid runs about 200 billion auctions per month—that’s 100,000 per second. Their business relies on heavy data processing and high-speed transactions, making a robust and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure a must have.

NoBid’s architecture includes three components: their ad server platform, their data ETL pipeline, and their insights platform. They have hundreds of containers (6 clusters across 4 regions), processing over 300,000 concurrent requests per second, with 1.3 PB/month in data egress bandwidth, making high-performance bandwidth with low latency core to their business operations.

As NoBid began to expand, they needed a cloud provider that could support their scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency goals. Initially, they built their infrastructure on AWS, but as their bandwidth costs grew significantly, they started searching for alternatives.

On DigitalOcean the price is right

After evaluating multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Oracle, NoBid decided to migrate its infrastructure to DigitalOcean in late 2024. Cost was a significant factor in their decision.

“The price DigitalOcean came back with was literally 20 to 30% cheaper than what we had been paying at AWS,” said Shawn Petersen, CIO at NoBid. “That gave us a lot of motivation to explore who DigitalOcean is and what services they could provide for us.”

Not only did NoBid leaders Shawn and Reda Guermas, CTO and Co-Founder of NoBid, make the internal pitch to migrate major workloads to DigitalOcean from AWS, but also the timing for the migration ended up happening during their busiest time of year—November/December. That they initiated migration during such a complicated time for them is a true testament to their belief that switching providers would be the right move. Thanks to a considered approach between the teams at NoBid and DigitalOcean, NoBid was able to migrate during the busy holiday season without a lot of architectural stress.

The DigitalOcean products NoBid uses and their migration process

NoBid’s infrastructure is heavily reliant on containers and high-speed data processing, which means they put a specific suite of DigitalOcean products to use:

• Kubernetes as the backbone for their containerized workloads

• VPCs and VPC Peering for secure internal networking

• Network Load Balancing to manage global traffic

• Internal Load Balancing to privatize internal endpoints

• Spaces (S3-compatible storage) for data retention

• And they are eventually looking to include Managed Databases

The migration plan consisted of three phases to mirror the three-part architecture of NoBid, starting with the ad server platform (the largest component) with the additional components of the data ETL pipeline and their insights platform to follow.

Throughout the migration journey, DigitalOcean’s support proved to be highly responsive. “From the very beginning we were given direct access to DigitalOcean engineers in a Slack channel. They became like an extension of our team,” said Petersen. “That level of support is something we hadn’t experienced before.”

NoBid also worked with DigitalOcean’s partner CTO.ai to solve key technical challenges, such as handling traffic spikes and optimizing egress traffic. “We really challenged DigitalOcean and CTO.ai, and, together, we worked out solutions that now support our high-traffic demands,” Guermas noted.

Outcomes and future plans

Since migrating to DigitalOcean in November 2024, NoBid experienced 16% savings by January with continual optimization toward the 20-30% savings that DigitalOcean originally quoted.

Spending less on infrastructure has also led to increased company innovation. “AWS’s high costs inhibited our ability to innovate, resolve problems, and create new products. We needed a cloud provider that was more startup-friendly,” added Guermas. Freed from AWS cost constraints, NoBid is exploring new tools like Clickhouse, Kafka, Redis, and GenAI to optimize its operations.

“We look forward to DigitalOcean being more than just a provider but a true partner in our growth,” said Guermas. As NoBid continues to expand its offerings and optimize its technology, DigitalOcean remains an integral part of its journey.

“We were ready for the next iteration of NoBid,” Petersen concluded. “DigitalOcean gave us the opportunity, the right price, and the flexibility to explore new solutions for our business.”

Interested in making a move? Learn more about migrating to DigitalOcean.