Over the past year AdMob engineering has been growing rapidly. Our engineers have been building increasingly interesting pieces of technology to serve the needs of our customers & the mobile ecosystem. Some of the work that we’re doing has a very visible, user-facing component. For instance, we’ve recently discussed AdMob Analytics and improvements to our ad creation process.

We’re really proud of these products and their user interfaces. However, we’re equally proud of all of the machinery that powers AdMob that isn’t always visible to our users. In order to share some of the details of this behind-the-scenes machinery, we’ve created a new AdMob Engineering Blog. In addition to simply sharing our engineer’s enthusiasm for things that we’re building, we also hope that this blog allows us to contribute back to the engineering community some useful best practices we’ve discovered as we’ve employed a mix of proprietary and open source technology to build a highly-available, 100M+ request per day Internet service.

The types of things that we hope to share with you over the coming weeks are how we’re using Hadoop to process large volumes of data, the tools and techniques that we use for reliable message delivery between our internal services, how we’re using a combination of third-party and custom AJAX component libraries to build rich, in-browser user interfaces, the tools and techniques we use for service monitoring, and how we’re managing application deployment across hundreds of machines and multiple data centers.

Posts on the AdMob Engineering Blog will be written by engineers and targeted at a technical audience. That said, we invite everyone who is interested to subscribe to the blog’s feed or to place this blog in your regular reading list.

We’re kicking off our engineering blog with a post about the mechanics of mobile ad serving. We’re often asked how mobile ad serving differs from traditional, online ad serving. This post provides part of the answer to this question.

–Kevin Scott