Netflix — In-House Ads Event Processing Pipeline
Netflix rebuilt its entire ad infrastructure in-house in January 2024, using Kafka, Flink, and Apache Druid with a sessionization pattern to collapse raw events into structured Ad Sessions.
Scale
Full-scale in-house ad infrastructure replacing Microsoft's platform
Before
Microsoft-managed ad infrastructure — external vendor dependency, limited iteration speed
After
Custom pipeline: Ads Event Publisher → Kafka → Flink transforms → Apache Druid (OLAP) + Ads Sessionizer Flink job
Key Insight
The sessionization pattern — collapsing a stream of events into a single structured entity (the 'Ad Session') — is a critical architectural primitive that enables campaign/creative-level analytics.
In a Snowflake Conversation
The sessionization pattern — collapsing a stream of events into a single structured entity (the 'Ad Session') — is what allows downstream analytics to query at the campaign/creative level instead of raw event level.
My Read
Practitioner commentary coming soon.
Relevant Conversations