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

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.

Bloated, outdated infrastructure struggled to enable real-time decisions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 Criteo was stuck on an outdated version of Couchbase to avoid scaling and budgetary limitations that came with newer or enterprise versions.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

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  Moved off of outdated community versions and onto the Aerospike Database Enterprise Edition that includes the latest innovations in real-time databases, enterprise support, and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.

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.