AppsFlyer Engineering in Numbers: Wrapping Up 2019
2019 was a big year for AppsFlyer.
And not just any kind of BIG.
Trillions of daily HTTP and postback events BIG.
Terabytes to petabytes of data BIG.
On a personal note, I started at AppsFlyer in December of 2018 as our 500th employee — and we nearly doubled that number in 2019 alone. The engineering group, being the largest group at AppsFlyer, demonstrates the hypergrowth that we are experiencing on all fronts.
This graph is taken from one of our presentations.
In truth, it doesn’t really matter what you define as the Y axis, as it can represent nearly every single thing at AppsFlyer: the number of people, clients, revenue, and, finally, that which makes it all possible — our engineering backbone that powers all of this growth.
You may have heard that AppsFlyer raised $210 million dollars earlier this week to fuel our next phase of growth, but I’d like to just pause for a minute to actually recognize everything that we accomplished, making this milestone possible.
One of the main challenges in coping with rapid growth is understanding how to scale without compromising stability, robustness, security or SLAs (i.e. the actual business goals), while also being conscious of utilization and cost effectiveness. None of these are simple feats, and they become exceedingly more difficult when coupled together.
This kind of growth requires a forward-thinking approach, where you actually find yourself thinking about the technologies, and systems engineering of tomorrow’s challenges, today.
This data is just a snapshot of the growth in just one year alone, where the last quarter of 2019, actually constitutes in numbers all of our usage in 2015 and 2016 together, and this is an ongoing trend.
We are growing at 10X scale every. single. year.
As an organization that prides itself on its engineering, one of our biggest challenges is scaling without breaking the bank.
This is achieved by making sure our systems are flexible enough to scale up and down as needed, and that we can utilize services such as spot instances and still maintain zero downtime for our clients.
One of the metrics that represents this most for us is our spot instance usage vs. on-demand hours. Check out the infographic and learn about some of the exciting facets of our engineering organization.
So the TL;DR is:
We’re growing, we’re learning through real hands-on experience and being challenged daily, we’re geared up to tackle tomorrow’s engineering complexities, and all this will be fueled by our new funding round.
