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August 13, 2020

Taboola harnesses big data to power the future of online advertising

New York City–based Taboola is one of the world’s leading discovery platforms. It helps more than 1.4 billion monthly users explore what’s interesting and new across the open web, generating approximately 30 billion personalized content recommendations every day. When its on-premises solution required additional capacity and ongoing management, Taboola moved to Microsoft Azure Data Explorer to power its next waves of growth. Within a week of implementation, Taboola was able to transform billions of raw data logs into actionable, quality insights at unprecedented speed and scale.

Taboola

With 1.4 billion unique users per month, a network of more than 20,000 premium publishers and brands, and a reach that extends to nearly half of the world’s internet population, New York–headquartered Taboola is one of the leading discovery platforms worldwide. With more than 1,400 employees in 22 offices globally, Taboola is focused on bringing internet users fresh, topical, and entertaining content, while providing advertisers with valuable opportunities to reach an engaged audience on trusted news sites.

From his office in Tel Aviv, Ariel Pisetzky, Vice President of Information Technology & Cyber at Taboola, explains, “We power ‘moments of next’. In essence, we connect the users’ attention to the next relevant piece of content. Our service spans about 1.4 billion unique users a month—which equates to approximately 3 to 4 billion webpages a day around the globe, or approximately 30 billion daily personalized recommendations.”

Toward exceptional data processing

By using contextual cues—rather than personal or demographic data—to better understand users’ interests, Taboola tailors the content recommendations it displays to every internet user with the aid of sophisticated machine learning and real-time inferencing. It’s a deeply data-driven process that subsequently put increasing pressure on Taboola’s IT infrastructure. especially as the company quickly grew.

“When we started out, we were a much smaller company,” explains Pisetzky, who has been with Taboola for the past seven years. “We used to do much less heavy lifting with our IT infrastructure. I've grown alongside the company from a few hundred servers to thousands of servers globally—from hundreds of millions of webpages a day to the billions of webpages a day we have now. As the company grew, things became challenging.”

With increasing data and log volume, Taboola began to hit roadblocks. “We had a lot of data coming in,” notes Pisetzky. “But not only that, we had changing logs, as well as the need to upgrade and change applications daily. That entailed a number of problems. The industry has a few solutions out there, but we were specifically looking for a solution for our log management. We wanted the capability to look at and analyze our logs with ease—especially given that turning raw logs into quality, actionable information can be quite difficult. We were seeking something that would push our abilities beyond what our existing industry standard on-premises solution could do. ... And then we found Azure Data Explorer and discovered its wealth of capabilities.”

From pilot to production

Taboola began its journey with Microsoft Azure Data Explorer with a one-week product trial. “We just got this amazing sense of ease,” Pisetzky says. “An amazing sense of calm—I mean, it just worked. Once we had shipped the logs, suddenly there was this moment of almost. … I want to say serendipity, where it just all clicked together. Instantly, we had transaction-level visibility. We had ease of creation of different types of charts, different types of alerts, different types of services. It just spread like wildfire and immediately clicked with the whole group in Taboola. All of a sudden, everyone was using ADX.”

It’s been a considerable change both for Taboola’s staff, as well as its customers and partners. “Before, I would have only aggregate-level reports [for advertisers],” says Pisetzky. “Now, with an extremely speedy interface, I can just click through, find all of the specific transactions and provide full information. I can troubleshoot much faster, too. ADX has become our go-to tool when we're troubleshooting, because it brings data faster. It generates insight from data. If I have a project and say to someone, ‘Look, here is the AB test: it's working better now,’ I'm not only showing them a graph, I'm coming to them with a Kusto query that they can continue to work with.”

Taboola’s success with Azure Data Explorer has turned the platform into an essential element of almost every aspect of the business. “Really, anywhere within the company you will find ADX as part of online displays. Not just in the team rooms, but as part of our service-level measurement dashboards and alerting systems. We even have alerts configured with ADX at the business level.”

Rapid ingestion, reliable performance

With ingestion speeds of 600,000 records per table per second―for a total of nearly 37 billion records per table, across dozens of tables―Azure Data Explorer has also drastically improved Taboola’s data processing speeds. It enabled high throughput data ingestion from the Microsoft Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider with near real-time latency. “It was hours and minutes compared to seconds, now. But beyond that, it was also a case of working versus not working,” recalls Pisetzky, “With the billions of lines of logs that we have daily, our old on-premises solution would sometimes crack under pressure. Not only does ADX work, it works really, really fast, and it stays highly performant regardless of scale. It provides amazing interactive capabilities to the teams, which allow them to do a whole lot more. I don't need to do anything about stability. It’s like turning on the faucet in your house. You expect water to come out 100 percent of the time. You don't think about the many people working in the background to make sure that there is correct piping and water pressure. You just take it for granted. Today, we also take ADX for granted.”

Taboola’s ability to provide support in real time has enhanced Taboola’s services dramatically. “We can catch events much faster,” says Pisetzky, “and even provide direct feedback during client calls.”

Pisetzky concludes, “You don't need any advice other than ‘just do it’. Just plug it in. It will start working. Even if you're not on the cloud, there are easy connectors. There is very little work to be done on the client side. I wouldn’t worry about the language, either. Kusto query language is really natural and easy to learn. The bottom line is, we enjoy the product. We enjoy talking about it and showing it off because it is a fun technology to use. Within one week, we knew we had a winner. Personally, I consider the chance of moving forward with Microsoft and ADX as a high point in my recent career.”

“Not only does ADX work, it works really, really fast, and it stays highly performant regardless of scale. It provides amazing interactive capabilities to the teams, which allow them to do a whole lot more.”

Ariel Pisetzky, Vice President of Information Technology & Cyber, Taboola

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