Campaign Budget Optimization at Rokt

This post describes Smart Budget, a tool developed by Rokt to help manage spending efficiently throughout an advertising campaign's budget period

Improving AWS SDK latency on EKS

At Rokt, we have services written in various languages that are deployed on different infrastructure. Over the last couple of years we’ve migrated our services onto Kubernetes. This blog post will walk through the findings and how we fixed a puzzling increase in startup and tail latency of one of our services caused by AWS SDK and how it performs authentication on EKS.

Design Sprints and why they’re important

A Design Sprint is a unique five-day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Through Rokt's Level Up program, I recently had the opportunity to participate in a masterclass on organising a collaborative design sprint.

Postman tests and how to include them in Bamboo build and deployment

Postman provides developers with a great set of tools that support every stage of the API lifecycle. The most frequent use case for a developer usually consists of debugging an API which was recently changed or broken by sending a request to the endpoint in question. While this example certainly serves a purpose to a development team, it's merely a small snippet of the full benefits that can be realised by using Postman. Another very powerful but arguably underused feature in Postman's set of tools is the ability to create and automatically run a collection of tests.

Views on our Values: There’s no ‘I’ in Rokt

At Rokt, we have four core values that define our work. We introduce you to ‘Smart with Humility’ – for Rokt, this means finding and nurturing smart individuals who are without egos, are willing to work as a team, use data to make decisions, and “play the ball (not the person)”.

Automated dependency testing with canary builds

It is increasingly common to use external dependencies and packages in projects but as it has been demonstrated, this can cause gaping security holes when not managed properly. While dealing with package dependencies in our environment, we often have a hard time figuring out the right balance between regular updates versus stability. One approach that provides some relief from managing dependencies and helps to find a better stability-security balance is the introduction of Canary builds.

DNS for private services

There are different means through which you can manage DNS records for your private services. At Rokt, we use a dual-home DNS that enables proper name resolution of infrastructure resources from both inside and outside the local network using a single domain name.

Learnings from gRPC on AWS

Our services are all hosted on AWS. As we move towards a microservice-centric architecture, we introduce latency in the form of network calls and serialization and deserialization times. This is significant for our consumer-facing services due to the high volume of traffic; and the latency-sensitive nature of our business. In an attempt to mitigate this, we spiked out the usage of gRPC, a reportedly more efficient transport mechanism.