Consumable is a fast-growing ad tech company that creates unique advertising experiences across audio, video, mobile, and web. With a real-time platform handling up to one million queries per second at peak times, performance, scalability, and simplicity are mission-critical. After joining the company as part of a technology acquisition in 2021, CTO Travis Beale was tasked with unifying a complex infrastructure across multiple legacy systems and cloud providers. That integration led to a pivotal decision about their cloud future.

Integrating and scaling a high-performance ad platform

The engineering team at Consumable was faced with integrating tech stacks and hosting environments from various acquisitions. A recently acquired product, ServerBid, was already running in a DigitalOcean account while other systems were hosted on AWS. The team had to choose where to consolidate their infrastructure.

As Travis recalled, “We had to make a choice between consolidating our server resources in DigitalOcean or consolidating them in AWS. And based on our cost modeling, DigitalOcean was the better deal for our workload.” That decision set the foundation for a broader shift to DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure, where they could better manage costs while meeting the company’s unique performance demands.

Why DigitalOcean?

Transparent pricing with room to grow

From the outset, pricing clarity played a key role in Consumable’s decision. Travis noted that there were definite cost savings when compared to running the same workload on AWS, and the team found DigitalOcean to be cost competitive with other platforms they had used in the past. Even as their infrastructure needs evolved and they adopted premium droplets to address latency issues, DigitalOcean worked closely with them to maintain a manageable cost structure. As their DigitalOcean account team pointed out, when the switch to premium droplets was made, the company worked with Consumable to ensure better performance without a dramatic increase in spend.

A developer experience built for simplicity

One of the biggest advantages for Consumable’s lean, fast-moving engineering team has been DigitalOcean’s straightforward developer experience. Travis described the platform’s philosophy as “everything you need, nothing you don’t,” explaining that while the tools are powerful, he doesn’t feel like he has to take a class just to use them. This level of intuitive usability allows the team to focus on building and optimizing, not navigating overly complex systems or processes.

Consistent performance

In programmatic advertising, milliseconds matter. Consumable runs a high-throughput, low-latency platform where response times must stay within just a few hundred milliseconds. As Travis explained, “DigitalOcean has helped us handle workloads up to 1 million requests per second,” which puts significant pressure on every part of their infrastructure. The move to premium droplets with dedicated CPUs was a key inflection point. “The performance wasn’t just better—it became more consistent. The thing we see from the premium droplets is consistency” That level of performance predictability is critical when every request is tied to real-time bidding revenue.

Responsive support

Consumable has subscribed to DigitalOcean’s Premium Support plan and found it to be an essential part of their success. According to Travis, “The VIP support has been excellent. Honestly, the support before we had the VIP support was good too. If there’s an issue, it’s always engineers on the line, not somebody who is two steps removed from the people that know what’s going on.”

Even beyond support, Travis appreciates that DigitalOcean has acted on their feedback. As a major user of the Load Balancer product, the Consumable team has met directly with product managers and engineers. “I really do appreciate that DigitalOcean has made changes based on our feedback,” he said, highlighting a level of collaboration that is rare among cloud providers.

DigitalOcean products and migrating from AWS

Consumable leverages a wide range of DigitalOcean products to power its platform, including Droplets, Load Balancers, Managed Databases, App Platform, Kubernetes (DOKS), Container Registry, and command-line tools for automation and monitoring.

Travis acknowledged that although it was a major undertaking, migrating away from AWS was relatively seamless. “There were some things that we were using on AWS that were a managed offering—our Redis cluster was one—so we just self-hosted that,” Travis said. He noted that while building and tuning their own Redis instance was more work, it gave them full control over performance. While migrating infrastructure may not be something anyone wants to do every year, it was a move that resulted in many net positives for the company.

If you’re interested in making the move, DigitalOcean now has a migration team ready to help!

Looking ahead: microservices and mobile growth

Consumable’s infrastructure continues to evolve. As they prepare to launch a mobile app and expand into services beyond their core ad business, the team is leaning into DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes offering to build a new microservice architecture.

Looking ahead, the focus remains on performance and scale. “We want to continue to scale our advertising products beyond 1 million queries per second,” Travis shared. And with DigitalOcean as a key infrastructure partner, they’re confident they can meet the technical demands of the next phase of growth.