Frequently Asked Questions
RTBkit is an open-source software framework that takes much of the hard engineering work out of creating a Real-Time Bidder for online advertising. Its open, service-oriented architecture can be used to assemble a bidder as simple or complex as desired. The RTBKit core connects to ad exchanges via Exchange Connectors and routes bid requests and data through a configurable set of components which can be extended to implement a customized bidder. More details.
Anyone can use RTBkit to build a real-time bidder. RTBkit is open-source software, so it is free to use within the bounds of the Apache License.
RTBkit is open-source software, it is feely available within the bounds of the Apache License.
RTBkit is software framework which developers can use to build real-time bidders. The first step is to download and explore the code and design your bidder around the RTBkit core and plugin architecture. If you need help, don't hesitate to join our Google Group or find a member of the RTBkit ecosystem to help you.
The best way to get involved is to download the code and start playing with it, join the Google Group to ask/answer questions, and eventually contribute some code back to the project.
RTBkit is written in high-performance C++11 and runs on Linux (Ubuntu 12.04).
Plugins extend C++ classes and plugin bindings currently exist for Javascript (V8/NodeJS). Bindings for other languages (Java, Python etc) should be reasonably straight-forward to build.
RTBkit services and components communicate with each other via ZeroMQ and HTTP. RTBkit uses Graphite to record statistics and Apache ZooKeeper for service discovery.
RTBkit is released under the Apache License, v2.0.
RTBkit was developed and released by Datacratic and is intended to become a community-led open-source project, contributions are welcome by all.
For more information on why Datacratic released RTBkit see RTBkit: An Exciting Day for Real Time Advertising on Datacratic's blog.
RTBkit is a collection of components which are meant to run behind a firewall which permits connections only to authorized users and exchanges. It is not intended to exposed to the open internet. RTBkit is open-source software, which encourages open collaboration, especially around issues such as security.
The RTBkit core is horizontally scalable and was designed to support 20,000 queries per second per high-end commodity server.
RTBkit does not include a user interface. The RTBkit core is a collection of software components which expose HTTP and ZeroMQ API's, which can be used as a back-end for an external user interface.
RTBkit is ad-server agnostic and is designed to work with any ad-server. RTBkit bidding agents specify which ad-server tags to bid with via a configuration message to the RTBkit core.
RTBkit is an exchange-agnostic framework and is meant to be compatible with any ad exchange. The RTBkit Core communicates with exchanges via Exchange Connector plugins. A connector for The Rubicon Project is already available, and connectors for AppNexus, Nexage, The Doubleclick Ad Exchange and others will be released in the coming weeks and months. Community contributions of Exchange Connector plugins are welcome!
RTBkit is an exchange-agnostic framework and is meant to be compatible with any ad exchange. The RTBkit Core communicates with exchanges via Exchange Connector plugins and these plugins depend on bid-request parsers. RTBkit's internal representation of a bid request is similar to OpenRTB's representation, with full round-trip serialization as a goal. This means that OpenRTB-formatted bid requests are easy to parse, although exchange-specific connectors or parser extensions may be required, depending on the specifics of each exchange's use of OpenRTB.
RTBkit is production ready. It has been running in production in a number of contexts and the 0.9 release has a stable API. A full version 1.0 release will be available in the coming weeks.
RTBkit is an exchange-agnostic framework and is meant to be compatible with any ad exchange, including video and mobile exchanges. The RTBkit Core communicates with exchanges via Exchange Connector plugins, and it is easy to write such plugins for OpenRTB-compatible exchanges. Connectors for major exchanges, including video and mobile exchanges, are expected in the coming weeks and months. Community contributions of Exchange Connector plugins are welcome!