Criteo is a leading global technology company that provides a global network for organizations to bid in real time for online display ads. With over 18,000 customers and five billion ads served every day, Criteo enables discovery, innovation, and choice on the open internet via their Commerce Media Platform.
About the company
Criteo
Challenge
Bloated, outdated infrastructure struggled to enable real-time decisions
Criteo relies on time-critical applications to serve up advertisers’ content to potential consumers. They perform matches 950 billion times a day with 50 ms response times. With growing demand among advertisers to reach more consumers and grow online sales, data loads and requests accelerated the demands on Criteo’s data infrastructure.
The system was a large global deployment spanning on-premises data centers in Asia, Europe, and North America. It needed to handle real-time decisions at 250M transactions per second at peak, involving data all over the world at sub-millisecond latencies. Use cases included managing images, user data, campaigns, and AI models.
Criteo’s original solution used Memcached and Couchbase. Criteo was stuck on an outdated version of Couchbase to avoid scaling and budgetary limitations that came with newer or enterprise versions. They soon began to struggle to keep up with the data demands.
The struggle to keep up with data demands
Unable to handle 300 TB of data from 1.2 trillion records
The necessity to reduce their server count
With 3,000 servers and six data centers, costs were getting out of control
Lack of performance, scale, and speed slowed down growth
Criteo needed the ability to handle current, new, and future petabyte-scale demands
Simplified data infrastructure delivers improved scale and performance
Up-to-date technology
Moved off of outdated community versions and onto the Aerospike Database Enterprise Edition that includes the latest innovations in real-time databases, enterprise support, and expertise.Simplified data infrastructure
Eliminates the separate caching layer, provides Criteo only one technology to manage and operate, and allows all data to be accessible, in real time.Better performance
Meets current and future performance requirements and provides fast, stable, low latency reads at the 99th percentile, allowing the application to handle 950 billion requests a day.Optimized, efficient server utilization
Combines high throughput, low data usage workloads and low throughput, and high data usage workloads on the same Aerospike cluster, optimizing server usage and reducing overall server footprint.Results
80% reduction in carbon footprint while meeting current and future demands
By the end of Criteo’s 3-year migration process, they refreshed and replaced both software and hardware components of their multi data center, global platform. The result is a standardized platform that can fulfill the current and future demands of their customers for reliable, rapid response times.
Supporting up to 300 TB of data
The solution processes data from 1.2 trillion records and 175 applications across Asia, Europe, and North America
80% footprint reduction
The number of servers went down from 3,000 to 600, reducing the footprint by over 70%
Millions of dollars in annual savings
The new platform reduced the number of servers, simplified operations, and allowed Criteo to use smaller, less expensive datacenters for their needs.
25 million transactions per second
With Aerospike, Criteo can match content with users 950 billion times a day and respond in just 50 ms.
Testimonials
We have many real-time decisions to make involving a lot of data and we need sub-millisecond processing for reading and writing data all over the world.
Maxime Brugidou, Engineering Director of Platforms, Criteo
Our data demands are growing exponentially, and we need a real-time data platform that can handle our current requirements but ensure that we can adapt and scale for what lies ahead. The Aerospike real-time data platform takes us to the next level in terms of scale and performance and provides us with a standardized platform that ensures our customers can meet the rapid response times they demand both now and in the future.
Diarmuid Gill, CTO of Criteo
