Yahoo Migrates Advertising Technology Workloads to AWS

By Greg Tavarez, TMCnet Editor  |  December 19, 2022

Many media and digital advertising companies rely on AWS as their cloud provider. It’s a no brainer with AWS offering more than 200 services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and AI and IoT, among others. Knowing the capabilities of AWS, Yahoo is the newest media entity to  select AWS as its public cloud provider, for Yahoo Ad Tech.

Yahoo Ad Tech reaches more than 540 million people worldwide. The platform allows advertising publishers, brands and agencies to upload creative and automate media-buying across an inventory of mobile, web and TV channels. 

To reach audiences at the right time in the right format though, insights are to be delivered to advertisers. AWS assists Yahoo Ad Tech in achieving that with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud compute-optimized instances. Powered by AWS-designed processors, publishers, advertising agencies and brand customers are provided with insights on real-time advertising performance.

AWS’s global infrastructure and extensive portfolio of cloud capabilities also enable Yahoo to innovate new features for its ad tech platform.

Amazon Simple Store Service allows Yahoo Ad Tech to construct a centralized data lake to store hundreds of petabytes of data. With the data lake, data silos are destroyed and AWS analytics services such as Amazon EMR and Amazon Athena are tapped into by Yahoo Ad Tech.

Amazon EMR is AWS’s cloud big data service for processing vast amounts of data using open-source tools, and Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data. Tapping into the analytics services supports rapid analysis of data from various sources, to understand advertising trends, target audiences and deliver ad performance insights across its operations.

Additionally, Yahoo Ad Tech is set to use Amazon SageMaker, a service for building, training, and deploying ML models in the cloud and at the edge. Utilizing SageMaker streamlines the Yahoo Ad Tech machine learning pipeline and deepens the company’s ability to predict advertising spends, ad inventory and the effectiveness of ad formats.

“Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS provides us with a broad portfolio of world-class services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space,” said Aaron Lake, senior vice president of Platforms Engineering and chief information officer at Yahoo.

To help employees develop skills in application development, data management and security to support Yahoo’s migration goals and drive innovation at scale, employees are provided with cloud skills training using the AWS Designated Virtual Trainer program.

The migration is part of the Yahoo Ad Tech’s ongoing digital transformation strategy to reduce IT infrastructure costs, transform its advertising business operations, and develop more tailored and immersive solutions to help brands connect with their audiences.




Edited by Erik Linask
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