How is AWS Lambda used in Localytics?

How is AWS Lambda used in Localytics?

Localytics is a Boston-based, web and mobile app analytics and engagement company. Its marketing and analytics tools are being extensively used by some major brands, such as ESPN, eBay, Fox, SalesForce and The New York Times, to understand and evaluate the performance of their apps and to engage with the existing as well as the new customers.

The software developed by Localytics is employed in more than 37,000 apps on more than 3 billion devices all around the world.

Regardless of how popular Localytics is now, Localytics had faced some serious challenges before they started using Lambda.

Let’s see what the challenges were before we discuss how Lambda came to the rescue and helped Localytics overcome these challenges.

Challenges

• Billions of data points uploaded every day from different mobile applications running Localytics analytics software are fed to the pipeline that they support.
• Additional capacity planning, utilization monitoring, and infrastructure management were required since the engineering team had to access subsets of data in order to create new services.
• The platform team was more inclined toward enabling self-service for engineering teams.
• Every time a microservice was added, the main analytics processing service for Localytics had to be updated.

   

• Localytics now uses AWS to send about 100 billion data points monthly through Elastic Load Balancing where ELB helps in distributing the incoming application traffic across multiple targets.
• Afterward, it goes to Amazon Simple Queue Service where it enables us to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.
• Then, it reaches Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and, finally, into an Amazon Kinesis stream that makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so that we can get timely insights and can react quickly to new information.
• With the help of AWS Lambda, a new microservice is created for each new feature of marketing software to access Amazon Kinesis. Microservices can access data in parallel.