Q&A with Dstillery’s Hang Chan

Hang Chan of Dstillery discusses their transition from Apache Cassandra to ScyllaDB for managing their large-scale data needs, which involve processing device-level data to support custom audience solutions in the marketing and advertising industry. Dstillery faced challenges with Cassandra, including a persistent failure rate that could not be mitigated by adding more nodes, leading them to adopt ScyllaDB for its near-zero failure rates and self-optimizing capabilities. By migrating to ScyllaDB, Dstillery managed to significantly reduce failure rates and server count, while benefiting from simplified configuration that automatically adjusts to workload demands. ScyllaDB is integral to Dstillery's infrastructure, providing rapid data lookup capabilities and supporting applications like real-time bidding and geodata authenticity verification. The company continues to use a combination of databases and tools, including MySQL, memcached, Hadoop/MapReduce, Apache Kafka, and their in-house middleware, Mercuryd, for a robust big data adtech architecture.