Powering global, real-time ad bidding with sub-millisecond processing

Customer story

Powering global, real-time ad bidding with sub-millisecond processing

About Criteo

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.

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Bloated, outdated infrastructure struggled to enable real-time decisions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 Criteo was stuck on an outdated version of Couchbase to avoid scaling and budgetary limitations that came with newer or enterprise versions.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 3,200 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

Solution

Simplified data infrastructure delivers improved scale and performance

Criteo considered several options for modernizing their data infrastructure, but only Aerospike delivered the performance, scaling, and latency requirements they needed. Additionally, they realized that Aerospike could replace both Memcached and Couchbase, eliminating the need to manage and operate two separate technologies.

Backed by Aerospike’s best-in-class support and expertise, Criteo now has a data partner throughout their digital transformation project that results in significantly improved scale and performance of its global commerce media platform.

The Aerospike solution provides:

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

75% footprint reduction

The number of servers went down from 3,200 to 800, reducing the footprint by over 75%

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.

250 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

CriteoEngineering Director of Platforms

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.