Video Streaming Advertising Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework
Publication date: December 9, 2025 (Document revisions)
This paper describes the Video Streaming Advertising (VSA) Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The lens explores how to review and improve your cloud-based architectures and better understand the impact of design decisions. We present general design principles and specific best practices aligned to the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.
Introduction
The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on six pillars. The pillars are operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability. AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partners to evaluate architectures, remediate risks, and implement designs that deliver business value.
In this lens, we focus on how to design, architect, and deploy your advertising workloads in the AWS Cloud. We define components, explore common workload scenarios, and outline design principles that help you apply the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We recommend that you begin designing your architecture by considering the best practices and questions from the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper.
Operational challenges with the advertising workloads are:
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High traffic volumes with tens of millions of transactions per second.
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Low latency application and data retrieval responses with single-digit millisecond response time SLA.
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Rapid changes in traffic volumes and associated fluctuations in compute and network infrastructure.
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Data transfer is a significant part of overall operational costs and a focus area.
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Very low revenue (and profit margin) per transaction drives the focus on cost. Cost efficiency is the dominant design principle.
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End-to-end network latency impacts time available for response processing. Roundtrip latency of under 300 milliseconds is required to meet industry trading service-level objectives (SLOs).
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The use of 3rd party ISVs (independent software vendors) requires responses under two milliseconds to meet end-to-end processing SLAs.
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Rapid traffic changes require stateless and flexible infrastructure to facilitate automated up and down scaling of platform.
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Flexible supply and demand reduces redundancy requirements.
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Handling massive data volumes (100+ petabytes) and high throughput (up to 1+ trillion events per week).
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Verify data privacy compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA while processing large amounts of user data.
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Providing low-latency reporting and ad-hoc querying capabilities for campaign performance analysis and business intelligence.
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Scaling data processing pipelines cost-effectively as data volumes and business complexity grow rapidly.
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Enabling advanced use cases like machine learning for advertising performance measurement and attribution modeling.
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Maintaining operational efficiency with managed services as engineering team sizes may not keep up with data growth.
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Achieving high availability and resilience in data pipelines to support critical advertising workloads.
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Address alternate solution option for addressable targeting to deliver personalized ads, due to significant signal loss of traditional data points like third-party cookies, mobile IDs (IDFA for iOS and the Android Advertising ID (AAID)), hashed emails, and IP addresses, driven by privacy regulations.
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In addition to these individual challenges, organizations face multiple interconnected challenges:
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Protecting user privacy while complying with evolving regulations like GDPR and CCPA
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Combating sophisticated ad fraud and verifying brand safety through robust content moderation
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Adapting to the phaseout of third-party cookies by developing alternative measurement approaches using first-party data and modeling
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Managing data quality and secure collaboration across multiple solutions and partners
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Effectively using AI/ML technologies for fraud detection, content moderation, and cross-system measurement while maintaining transparency and human oversight
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Three main categories of digital advertising fraud: placement fraud, traffic fraud, and action fraud. These fraudulent activities employ both automated and manual methods, targeting different aspects of the advertising solution.
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Placement fraud involves manipulating ad placements through techniques like malvertising, ad stacking, fake websites, domain spoofing, and ad injection.
Placement fraud
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Traffic fraud focuses on artificially inflating visitor numbers and clicks using bots or human labor.
Traffic fraud
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Action fraud includes falsifying conversions, manipulating re-targeting data, and various forms of affiliate fraud.
Action fraud
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This lens specifies best practices that address the unique characteristics of building and operating advertising workloads in the cloud. They are based on our experience with industry developers and operations teams. It provides guidance on how to design and operate your environment addressing the operational challenges.
This document is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), Technical directors, architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this document, you will understand AWS best practices and recommended strategies to use when designing and operating architectures for advertising workloads.
Lens availability
Custom lenses extend the best practice guidance provided by AWS Well-Architected Tool. AWS WA Tool allows you to create your own custom lenses, or to use lenses created by others that have been shared with you.
To begin reviewing your advertising workload, download and import the Video Streaming Advertising Lens
