IAB Tech Lab launches Containerisation Project to tackle programmatic infrastructure challenges

New Delhi: The IAB Tech Lab, a global body responsible for setting technical standards in digital advertising, has announced the launch of its Containerisation Project. The initiative is designed to address persistent and emerging issues affecting the development and scalability of programmatic advertising infrastructure.

Industry participants have raised concerns about growing complexities caused by specialised partners involved in bid enrichment and evaluation, scaling limitations especially during live events as well as fragmented systems and inconsistent performance across platforms. In response, the IAB Tech Lab aims to standardise Container technology for OpenRTB (Open Real-Time Bidding) as a means to support the development of a more scalable and efficient programmatic ecosystem.

“After more than a decade of incredible growth, the digital ad ecosystem has pushed the current framework upon which programmatic is built to its limits,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “The way ad tech is built today is complex and has the potential to introduce inefficiency at integration points. The Containerization Project is not about incremental change. While Open RTB isn’t going anywhere, we are taking a hard look at how programmatic architecture is deployed and the underlying protocols, such as HTTP/1.1, and proposing a more intentional, durable foundation to innovate the next generation of real-time bidding.”

The newly formed Tech Lab Containerisation Project Working Group is leading the initiative. Its initial work covers several technical areas, including recommendations on supported network protocols, performance measurement, baseline image specifications, and security guidelines. The group is also focusing on responsible data handling practices in containerised environments for specific applications, including bid request and response enrichment, curation signals, and fraud detection.

By standardising use cases, the project intends to allow participants in the programmatic supply chain—such as Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) and Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs)—to more easily integrate and replace real-time bidding services without affecting efficiency or increasing latency.

“This gives engineers a shared technical foundation to build from,” said Meera Choudhury, Head of Product at Chalice AI. “By establishing clarity on what is required, we can build in a way that respects those boundaries.”

“Consistency across teams and partners is key,” said Leo Ramirez, Vice President of Engineering at Index Exchange. “The absence of shared technical expectations has been a challenge. This project starts to address that.”