Criteo is the leading performance marketing technology company. It is based in Paris with offices around the world. Criteo enables e-commerce businesses to provide personalized ads and email to users who have previously visited a retailer’s site. To provide this service, Criteo must log and process extremely large amounts of data. They use that data to build a real-time model that can predict consumer behavior.
Criteo has seven data centers spread across three continents, with approximately 6,000 Windows servers and 9,000 Linux servers. Criteo manages all 15,000 of them with Chef.
Criteo first began using Chef in 2012 and Chef has greatly increased its ability to scale. Maxime Brugidou is an SRE lead at Criteo. He says:
Chef has had a tremendous impact on our business. We were able to scale our operations in a way that would have been impossible without it. For example, we have two engineers who handle a fleet of 4K servers, and this isn’t even their main priority. I can’t imagine our business being successful without this level of automation. We’ve had to install thousand and thousands of servers over the years and open new data centers. It would have not have been possible with the tools we used to use.”
You can read more about how Criteo is using Chef here, in this Skills Library article.