Powering Adobe's Real-Time Advertising Analytics with gRPC Streaming

Explore how Adobe Advertising built a high-performance reporting backend using gRPC and server-side streaming to deliver real-time analytics with sub-second latency in this 24-minute conference talk. Learn how Adobe's engineers overcame the limitations of traditional REST/JSON approaches when handling massive datasets from SQL databases, Druid, and Trino for their Performance Insights dashboard. Discover the technical journey from initial design to production implementation, understanding why gRPC emerged as the optimal solution for data-intensive applications. Examine how Protobuf enables complex, strongly-typed query contracts and how stream responses dramatically improve perceived performance by sending data to clients as it becomes available. Compare the advantages of gRPC streaming against RESTful services for large, tabular data retrieval, and gain insights into building scalable real-time analytics systems that can handle dynamic user-defined reports while maintaining exceptional user experience.