Running Druid: From Opinions to Insights, to Action and Impact

Here at Ippen Digital we build scalable software solutions for a continuously growing network of over 80 regional news publishers in Germany. This network delivers content for over 100 million monthly active users across various different platforms. Our mission is clear: we want to nurture pluralistic journalism and give our publishers the possibility to voice their opinions openly, while still being profitable for them to continue doing what they are meant to do. On the other hand we want to provide our audience with a great user experience and the content that is really relevant to them. Therefore we aim to truly understand our users and give them a reason to adapt their habits. Together with psychologists we are opening up the field of behavioral science and contextual optimization. The software ecosystem we have built to achieve these goals is sophisticated and state-of-the-art with Apache Druid as one of its core elements. Our data journey with Apache Druid started 3.5 years ago. As our central facts and KPI storage, Druid allows us to generate valuable insights for management and editors alike through dashboards and reports, it provides our data science teams with explorative datasets, and it serves as an integral part for several products – for instance, editorial news assistance in the newsrooms or a personal news assistant – as well as machine learning algorithms. We are here to share our experiences and learnings, and we want to give a high-level demonstration of the potential and benefits of running Apache Druid in a complex data environment while also showing two concrete examples.