snowgrid Magnite’s Seamless Petabyte Scale Cross-Region Migration with Snowgrid

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Magnite stands as the largest independent sell-side advertising platform, providing an essential bridge between publishers and advertisers. At its core, Magnite streamlines the advertising process, facilitating the buying and selling of advertising space across various channels, including connected TV (CTV), mobile, and desktop environments. By leveraging advanced technology and data analytics, Magnite offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to maximize ad revenue for publishers while helping them effectively reach their target audiences.

A strategic acquisition and the need for integration

In 2021, Magnite made a decisive move to strengthen its position in the CTV advertising market by acquiring SpringServe, a leader in CTV ad-serving technology. While this acquisition was a strategic fit for Magnite, integrating the two companies’ data platforms presented a unique set of challenges. Magnite was operating its Snowflake data platform on AWS US West, whereas SpringServe had its presence on AWS US East. As business needs demanded more frequent data sharing across these units, the costs associated with transferring large data sets across these cloud regions also began to rise.

Recognizing the inefficiencies and escalating costs of operating in separate cloud regions, Magnite decided to consolidate its operations in AWS US East. This decision was not only cost-effective but also strategically aligned with the location of many of their clients, facilitating easier data sharing between Magnite and SpringServe business units, as well as with external clients who also use Snowflake as their cloud data platform.

Leveraging account replication powered by Snowgrid

The major hurdle in this consolidation process was the migration of Magnite’s Snowflake account, which contained more than 1 Petabyte (PB) of data spread across numerous databases. Additionally, Magnite’s Snowflake account was integrated with an identity provider for Single Sign-On (SSO). There was a strong requirement to seamlessly migrate hundreds of users, roles, and other account-level objects, including compute resources and cloud storage integrations.

Snowflake’s account replication capabilities powered by Snowgrid, dramatically simplified this whole migration experience. This powerful feature allowed Magnite to quickly establish a failover group that defined all the objects that needed to be migrated. Remarkably, the entire dataset with over 1.2 PBs was replicated in just one day. Account replication also empowers consistent application of all privileges and grants on various objects, thereby maintaining data integrity and preventing unauthorized access.

A testament to efficiency and speed

The migration process, including testing and setup, was completed in merely a week, significantly faster than anticipated. The incremental refreshes from US West to US East required to synchronize data were also very quick, and the final switchover occurred in minutes. The seamless experience allowed all the client applications connected to Snowflake to be completely unaware of this whole migration effort and required zero client-side code changes. The entire migration journey was owned and managed independently by a small data platform team at Magnite. 

“The speed of replication exceeded our expectations,” said Matt Sullivan, Director of Engineering at Magnite praised the migration. “The whole experience of setting up account replication and completing the migration was incredibly smooth and ran without a hitch. It’s a testament to Snowflake’s robust platform and the careful planning by our teams.”

Magnite’s successful migration to a unified cloud region underscores the importance of agile data-management strategies in today’s competitive landscape. Unforeseen events like executive realignments, acquisitions and mergers can throw a curveball at your cloud strategy. A platform with a cross-cloud and cross-region technology layer, like Snowgrid, guarantees a seamless transition when the need arises — giving you peace of mind and future-ready data management. Learn more about how your company can migrate across cloud platforms with speed, efficiency, and minimal to no disruption with Cross-Cloud Snowgrid.

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