Search by Algolia
Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success
e-commerce

Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success

In the midst of the Black Friday shopping frenzy, Algolia soared to new heights, setting new records and delivering an ...

Bernadette Nixon

Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry
ai

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry

When was your last online shopping trip, and how did it go? For consumers, it’s becoming arguably tougher to ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?
e-commerce

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?

Have you put your blood, sweat, and tears into perfecting your online store, only to see your conversion rates stuck ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?
ai

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?

“Hello, how can I help you today?”  This has to be the most tired, but nevertheless tried-and-true ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape
algolia

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape

We are proud to announce that Algolia was named a leader in the IDC Marketscape in the Worldwide General-Purpose ...

John Stewart

VP Corporate Marketing

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences
e-commerce

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences

Twice a year, B2B Online brings together America’s leading manufacturers and distributors to uncover learnings and industry trends. This ...

Jack Moberger

Director, Sales Enablement & B2B Practice Leader

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?
ai

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs). These two cutting-edge AI technologies sound like totally different, incomparable things. One ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What is generative AI and how does it work?
ai

What is generative AI and how does it work?

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, YouChat, DALL-E, Jasper…chances are good you’re leveraging some version of generative artificial intelligence on ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions
product

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions

Your users are spoiled. They’re used to Google’s refined and convenient search interface, so they have high expectations ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction
ai

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction

Imagine if, as your final exam for a computer science class, you had to create a real-world large language ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

The pros and cons of AI language models
ai

The pros and cons of AI language models

What do you think of the OpenAI ChatGPT app and AI language models? There’s lots going on: GPT-3 ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive
e-commerce

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive

In the fast-paced and dynamic realm of digital merchandising, being reactive to customer trends has been the norm. In ...

Lorna Rivera

Staff User Researcher

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there
ai

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there

You’re at a dinner party when the conversation takes a computer-science-y turn. Have you tried ChatGPT? What ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What are large language models?
ai

What are large language models?

It’s the era of Big Data, and super-sized language models are the latest stars. When it comes to ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices
ux

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices

Did you know that 86% of the global population uses a smartphone? The 7 billion devices connected to the Internet ...

Alexandre Collin

Staff SME Business & Optimization - UI/UX

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability
engineering

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability

The Cloud Native Foundation is known for being the organization behind Kubernetes and many other Cloud Native tools. To foster ...

Tim Carry

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites
product

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites

TL;DR Revamp your technical documentation search experience with DocSearch! Previously only available to open-source projects, we're excited ...

Shane Afsar

Senior Engineering Manager

4 questions to ask for relevant search results
product

4 questions to ask for relevant search results

Relevance – it’s what we’re all going for with our search implementations, but it’s so subjective that it ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

Looking for something?

facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

At Algolia, we are obsessed with finding a way to have a 99.9999% available architecture. On our way to achieve that, we have to make sure every piece of the architecture can safely fail without affecting the service.

The first point of the architecture where a customer’s request starts to interact with our service is not the router in the datacenter, but a DNS resolving a domain name to the IP address “long time” before that. This piece of architecture is very often overlooked and that is no surprise as you mostly get best-effort DNS service automatically with your server.

Latency

For couple months we are a happy user of NSONE that provides us with the first level of logic. We use NSONE for its superb performance and data-driven DNS that gives us control in steering the traffic of our Distributed Search Network to the proper server – whether it means closest or simply available one. But as any other network dependent service, there are factors outside of NSONE’s control that can influence availability of its DNS resolves and consequently Algolia. BGP routing is still a huge magic and “optimizations” of some ISPs are beyond understanding. Well, they do not always make the optimizations in the direction we would like to. For some services the change of DNS resolution time from 10 to 500ms does not mean a lot but for us it is a deal breaker.

nsone-dig-latency
Resolution of latency-1 via NSONE

DDoS

When we started to think about our DNS dependency, we remembered the 2014 DDoS attack on UltraDNS and the situation when there was not enough #hugops for all the services impacted. During the previous attack on UltraDNS in 2009 even big names like Amazon and SalesForce got impacted.

Solution

In most of the cases it would mean adding another DNS name server from a different provider and replicate the records. But not in ours. NSONE has some unique features that we would have to give up and find a common feature subset with a different provider. In the end we would have to serve a portion of DNS resolutions via slower provider for no good reason.

Since we provide custom made API clients we have one more place where to put additional logic. Now came a time to choose a resilient provider for our secondary DNS and since we like AWS, Route53 was a clear choice. Route53 has ok performance, many POPs around the world and API we already had integration for.

In the last moment, one more paranoid idea came to us – let’s not rely on a single TLD. No good reason for that, it was just “what if…?” moment.

route53-dig-latency
Resolution of latency-1 via Route53

Right now, all the latest versions of our API clients (detailed list below) use multiple domain names. “algolia.net” is served by NSONE and provides all the speed and intelligence, “algolianet.com” is served by Route53 in case that for any reason contacting server via “algolia.net” fails. It brings more work to our side, brings more cost on our side but it also brings better sleep for our customers, their customers and us.

And now we can think what else can fail…

Minimal versions of API clients with support of multiple DNS:

About the author
Adam Surak

Director of Infrastructure & Security @ Algolia

twitter

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

How to build a scalable DNS load balancing system
engineering

Paul Berthaux

Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Speeding up our Crawler parallel processing by 50 percent
engineering

Samuel Bodin

Software Engineer Crawler

Comparing Algolia and Elasticsearch For Consumer-Grade Search Part 1: End-to-end Latency
engineering

Josh Dzielak