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Guest post by Julien Lemoine, co-founder & CTO of Algolia, a developer friendly search as a service API.
Algolia started in 2012 as an offline search engine SDK for mobile. At this time we had no idea that within two years we would have built a worldwide distributed search network.
Today Algolia serves more than 2 billion user generated queries per month from 12 regions worldwide, our average server response time is 6.7ms and 90% of queries are answered in less than 15ms. Our unavailability rate on search is below 10-6 which represents less than 3 seconds per month.
The challenges we faced with the offline mobile SDK were technical limitations imposed by the nature of mobile. These challenges forced us to think differently when developing our algorithms because classic server-side approaches would not work.
Our product has evolved greatly since then. We would like to share our experiences with building and scaling our REST API built on top of those algorithms.
We will explain how we are using a distributed consensus for high-availability and synchronization of data in different regions around the world and how we are doing the routing of queries to the closest locations via an anycast DNS.
The data size misconception
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