Building Pinterest Real-Time Ads Platform Using Kafka Streams (Liquan Pei + Boyang Chen, Pinterest) Kafka Summit SF 2018 In this talk, we are sharing the experience of building Pinterest’s real-time Ads Platform utilizing Kafka Streams. The real-time budgeting system is the most mission-critical component of the Ads Platform as it controls how each ad is delivered to maximize user, advertiser and Pinterest value. The system needs to handle over 50,000 queries per section (QPS) impressions, requires less than five seconds of end-to-end latency and recovers within five minutes during outages. It also needs to be scalable to handle the fast growth of Pinterest’s ads business. The real-time budgeting system is composed of real-time stream-stream joiner, real-time spend aggregator and a spend predictor. At Pinterest’s scale, we need to overcome quite a few challenges to make each component work. For example, the stream-stream joiner needs to maintain terabyte size state while supporting fast recovery, and the real-time spend aggregator needs to publish to thousands of ads servers while supporting over one million read QPS. We choose Kafka Streams as it provides milliseconds latency guarantee, scalable event-based processing and easy-to-use APIs. In the process of building the system, we performed tons of tuning to RocksDB, Kafka Producer and Consumer, and pushed several open source contributions to Apache Kafka. We are also working on adding a remote checkpoint for Kafka Streams state to reduce the time of code start when adding more machines to the application. We believe that our experience can be beneficial to people who want to build real-time streaming solutions at large scale and deeply understand Kafka Streams.