Key points
- Seven West Media triggers server-side tracking based on Snowplow data received from clients
- Tracking is made simpler through centralisation and fanning out
- Google Cloud Platform port of Snowplow is now available and ready for production
- Real-time data into BigQuery
Last night we ran another Snowplow Analytics Sydney meetup with about 35 people attending, a mix of our clients, Open Source users and people with an interest in modern analytics. We had a lot of fun and learnt a lot from our two speakers.
Luke Lewandowski took us through the journey Seven West Media has taken with Snowplow and a very interesting use case. SWM has a custom Snowplow SDK working from 12+ platforms (web, native mobile, smart TVs, game consoles etc) and uses AWS Lambda to extract and send out data to other platforms. This minimises moving parts and requires less updates on those complex platforms.
The platform held up well with the annual stress test of the Melbourne Cup where they saw 17 million live streaming minutes
Josh Beemster took us through the new Google Cloud Platform port of Snowplow which has just been released. The port takes advantage of GCP’s data primitives which enable simpler autoscaling. Really exciting is that it delivers data into BigQuery in real-time, about 5-10 second latency, giving you SQL access to very fresh data. Costs are a little different without the fixed always-on database you get with Redshift, but with per-query costs being a new experience for many companies.
