How Voodoo Runs Iceberg at Massive Scale Without Losing Engineering Time

Customer Snapshot

Voodoo is a global mobile games and apps publisher with 800 employees, generating $670M in revenue in 2024, serving 150M monthly active users, and reaching 8B total downloads worldwide.

The Challenge

Voodoo runs a large-scale Apache Iceberg lakehouse at the core of its in-house ad network. While Iceberg delivered major gains in performance and flexibility, operating it reliably at scale required constant manual maintenance - compaction, cleanup, retention, and careful scheduling to avoid write conflicts.

This work was essential to keeping the platform running reliably, but it naturally consumed senior engineering time that could otherwise be applied to monetization, experimentation, and platform evolution. As the lakehouse scaled, the team also needed better centralized visibility, stronger GDPR governance, and more continuous optimization of storage and compute, without adding additional internal tooling.

The Solution

Voodoo adopted the Ryft Iceberg Management Platform to replace its homegrown maintenance pipelines with an intelligent operational management layer.

Ryft automatically manages Iceberg table maintenance, including compaction, cleanup, retention, and optimization,  without introducing new pipelines, manual tuning, or workflow disruption. It also provides end-to-end visibility across Iceberg tables and enforces governance and compliance requirements within Voodoo’s existing security model.

Result

With the Ryft Platform in place, Iceberg table maintenance disappeared from day-to-day operations.

Business and technical outcomes:

• 10x compression improvement on the largest tables
• 95% reduction in pipeline contention
• $100Ks saved across storage, compute, and maintenance
• 1 full-time data engineer reclaimed
• Predictable Iceberg operations at PB scale
• Centralized visibility and GDPR compliance without custom tooling

Engineers no longer monitor or tune optimization jobs. Instead, they focus on building products, running experiments, and advancing the data platform in support of the business.

Why It Matters

The Ryft Platform turned Iceberg from an operational burden into invisible infrastructure. Voodoo’s data team gained performance, confidence, and time, while the lakehouse simply runs.