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8/3/2019 Ecommerce It Planning

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Preparing Your IT for the HolidaysA quick start guide to take your e-commerce to the Cloud

September 2011
http://cloud.8kmiles.com/http://cloud.8kmiles.com/


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Prepare your IT for the Holidays: A Quick start guide to taking E-Commerce to the Cloud

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Preparing your IT for the Holidays:

Contents

Introduction E-Commerce Landscape .....................................................................................................................2

Introduction to AWS ...................................................................................................................................................3

AWS Components for E-Commerce applications .......................................................................................................4

IT Challenges faced by E-Commerce Companies........................................................................................................6

Capacity Planning during Normal Times ................................................................................................................6

Scaling and Capacity Planning during Peak times ..................................................................................................7

Unexpected Demand Surge ....................................................................................................................................8

Lead time for leasing and procurement .................................................................................................................8

Solving the e-commerce IT Challenges using Amazon Web Services.........................................................................9

Address Scalability challenge using Amazon Autoscaling ...................................................................................9

Address High Availability challenge using Multiple Availability Zones (AZ) and AWS building blocks ............ 11

Address Performance challenge using CDN, ELB, Caching and DB .................................................................. 12

Address Cost optimization challenge with pay-for-use model ........................................................................ 13

Summary .................................................................................................................................................................. 14

Next Steps ................................................................................................................................................................ 15
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Introduction E-Commerce Landscape--------------------------------------------------------------------

Globally, the E-Commerce industry is growing at a rapid click. Forrester US Online Retail Forecast

predicts it to reach about $279 billion dollars by 2015. The industry is seeing huge growth due in large

parts to the growing number of new online customers (who accounted for 30% of the sales in 2010) as

well as the increase in the average spend by existing online consumer base.

The E-Commerce market is typically a High Volume, Low margin business with about 60-65% of the

annual online sales happening during the holiday season. During this time, e-commerce sites see an

average of4 to 6 times the normal traffic. The increasing number of online consumers and the

unpredictable and sharp demand spikes during holidays create a unique set of challenges for IT

infrastructure planning.

This eBook serves as a guide to understand the key IT challenges (with a specific focus on the

challenges during Thanksgiving and the holiday season) faced by e-commerce companies and how to

build a strategy using Amazon Web Services to address those challenges. From identifying the right

AWS components for your e-commerce application to providing practical use cases, this eBook will give

you the essential steps to take your e-commerce application to the cloud and be prepared for huge

traffic.


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Introduction to AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of remote computing services (also called web services)

that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com.

Advantages of AWS

- Elastic: AWS provides services to increase or decrease capacity in minutes, not hours or days!

Through the web services your application can use this capacity as needed.

- Flexible: AWS supports all the popular operating systems and software packages. EC2 allows

granular control over configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, boot partition size

allowing you to tune the optimal system for your application.

- Reliable: AWS offers a highly reliable environment and runs it on Amazons proven network

infrastructure and datacenters. Amazon EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95% uptime, while S3

guarantees uptime of 99.999999999%.

- Secure: AWS is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant and ISO 27001 certified and follows a strict security

protocol in their physical datacenters. Apart from these certifications, AWS also supports SSL,

encrypted FS and provides the ability to setup a dedicated private cloud infrastructure called

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

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Pay-per-use nature of AWS services results in cost effective IT infrastructure.
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AWS Components for E-Commerce applications

AWS provides several web services for applications to take advantage of. This section gives a brief

overview about some of the important services that would be most relevant for e-commerce

applications.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces

to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application

environment, manage your networks access permissions, and run your image using as many or few

systems as you desire.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be

used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon S3

provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services

to give businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer

speeds, and no commitments.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon

EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly

providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic.

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, flexible, and scalable non-relational data store that offloads the

work of database administration. Unbound by the strict requirements of a relational database, Amazon

SimpleDB is optimized to provide high availability, flexibility, and ease of scalability with little or no

administrative burden.


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Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications customers run

on AWS. Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor your instances, volumes, and DB instances in

real-time. Metrics such as CPU utilization, latency, and request counts are provided automatically for

these AWS resources.

Messaging Services

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing

messages as they travel between computers.

Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up,

operate, and send notifications from the cloud.

Simple Email Service (SES)

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and

transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the

complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a

third-party email service.


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IT Challenges faced by E-Commerce Companies

A typical e-commerce application will have multiple layers (Web server, Application server that may be

running the catalog, storefront, fulfillment, content management and other applications, ERP system

and data storage having both structured data like RDBMS and unstructured data) each running on oneor more servers. All of these require server capacity that has to be planned efficiently. Some of the key

IT challenges that you would face while managing an e-commerce application are listed below:

IT Challenge 1: Capacity Planning during Normal Times

Demand to an e-commerce website varies throughout the day. On a typical day it picks up steam as the

day begins and will handle hundreds of transactions through the day and will subside as the day comes

to an end.

This variation in the traffic load leads to lot of inefficiencies. On an average about 40% of the compute

capacity gets wasted because of over provisioning.


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IT Challenge 2: Scaling and Capacity Planning during Peak times

During peak times such as Thanksgiving and holiday season, capacity planning becomes even more

complicated. These periods usually see a surge in traffic due in large part to the offers and promotions

offered by the retail companies.

In the traditional approach (with in-house or Data center hosted), the only way to handle such huge

loads is by forecasting the maximum traffic and providing surplus capacity to handle this. However, this

leads to huge inefficiencies because all this extra capacity goes waste when the demand doesnt match

supply.


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IT Challenge 3: Unexpected Demand Surge

Unexpected demand spikes can happen any time (fire sale or a super-hot product getting released) and

planning for them in a traditional IT model is next to impossible. Not being able to meet demands at

these times can have an adverse effect on revenues and top line in the short term and loyalty and

brand name in the long run.

IT Challenge 4: Lead time for leasing and procurement

Traditional infrastructure requires ordering the physical server boxes from the hardware vendors,

taking delivery, the real estate and controlled environment for housing, configuring and bringing up

these servers. This is a long drawn out process involving the co-ordination of multiple departments (IT,

Finance, Purchase) and can take anywhere between 1-3 months.

Even in the case of leasing it is no different. Setting up the required configuration and bringing it up live

can take at least 2-4 weeks and they typically mandate a minimum lease commitment of a quarter. All

these result in cost and time inefficiencies.

In summary, the 4 key challenges are Scalability, High Availability, Performance and Cost

Optimization.


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Solving the e-commerce IT Challenges using Amazon Web Services

Address Scalability challenge using Amazon Autoscaling

Amazon Auto Scaling is a service that helps you seamlessly scale out Amazon EC2 instances (that is

running your e-commerce application) when demand increases and scale down these instances when

demand recedes.

Policies can be set to determine when and how the scaling (up or down) of instances has to happen.

Policies are mostly set based on the system parameters such as CPU threshold, disk space and so on.

These parameters can be actively monitored by Amazon CloudWatch which is a service that provides

monitoring for AWS cloud resources and the applications that customers run on AWS.

The Elastic Load Balancer manages the connections to the active EC2 instances and distributes the load

between them.


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The figure below shows the differences in scaling pattern between traditional IT infrastructure and

Amazon Web Services. As is apparent from the figure, traditional IT is not only slow in responding to

demand but also leads to underutilization of resources and cost leakage; whereas the on-demand pay-

as-you-go nature of AWS results in demand matching supply at all times leading to significant cost

savings and availability of the application.

Some of the benefits of Amazon Autoscaling are:

- Dynamically scale fleet of EC2 instances

- Traffic spikes can be handled with ease

-Drive scaling from actual metrics

- Predefined scaling activities:

- Periodic (for daily traffic surge)

- One-time (special days such as Black Friday)


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Address High Availability challenge using Multiple Availability Zones (AZ) and

AWS building blocks

Availability Zones are distinct locations with low latency connectivity inside the same region. They have

independent power, cooling, networking and security systems.

To take advantage of the AZs, the application stacks need to be partitioned across two or more AZs.

This includes the web, application, search, caching and database layers. Autoscaling is configured to

automatically scale up or scale down across multiple AZs. Amazon RDS is configured with Hot Standby

to automatically become active when the master database goes down as shown in the figure below.


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Address Performance challenge using CDN, ELB, Caching and DB

Performance is one of the crucial elements of an E-Commerce website which directly affects the

revenue of the service. Poor web experience has an adverse effect on revenue, brand and loyalty.

Keeping high performance levels, however, becomes very difficult during high traffic days such as the

Thanksgiving and holiday season. There are 4 key performance optimization techniques that you

should consider when your e-commerce application is running on AWS.

1. Content Delivery Network: Amazon CloudFrount which is a content delivery service can be

used to serve up images, CSS stylesheets and other static or streaming content of the E-

Commerce site faster to the customers. Even E-Commerce modules such as catalogs, search,

product displays and shopping carts benefit a lot because of the low latency and high speeds.

2. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB):As discussed earlier, ELB helps in distributing load to the various

EC2 instances. ELB performance can be further improved by pre-warming the Amazon ELBs

when there is an anticipation of heavy traffic (such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday). Another

way to increase performance is to load the SSL certificates of the ELB rather than the server

there by offloading precious CPU cycles.

3. Caching:Caching is another performance optimization technique. User preferences, product

details and user comments are some of the components that are good candidates for caching.

Amazon has recently launched ElastiCache to help in adding in-memory cache to your

application architecture. Another way to go about caching is to have Memcached or Membase

clusters.

4. Database Optimizations:Amazon RDS is a relational database service which supports MySQL

and Oracle databases at present. To improve overall read performance, multiple read slaves

can be added to the RDS. Also, some of the load can be offloaded to other services such as

Amazon SimpleDB or MongoDB. As the database grows in size, they can be shard to improve

overall performance.


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Address Costoptimization challenge with pay-for-use model

AWS has the potential to change the E-Commerce IT landscape because of the change in the cost

structure it brings to the equation. No longer do you have to spend large capital on acquiring IT

hardware (own or lease) and subsequent maintenance. The pay-for-use model of AWS reduces the

overall cost by a huge margin in comparison to the traditional IT model. One of the best features of

AWS costing is that, there is no upfront commitment that is required. You only pay for what you use!

The above chart gives a quarter by quarter cost comparison for a typical mid-tier E-Commerce

company. For our calculations, we have assumed 10 quad core servers during the regular season, while

scaling up to 50 quads during the holiday season. On the AWS side, we have assumed 18 hours of peak

traffic and 6 hours normal traffic during the holiday season (as AWS has the ability to scale on-

demand). We can see that the percentage savings during the holiday season amounts to 64% of

traditional IT costs. These costs can be further optimized with the use of the right Autoscaling setup

and configurations.


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Summary

The seasonal demands of the e-commerce business make it a perfect candidate for AWS. With AWS,

you can scale your capacity on-demand with no fear of lost sales due to slow load times or site

unavailability issues. A strategy around AWS will help you focus on your business and not on yourservers.

There are multiple ways in which your e-commerce application can leverage AWS. Some of the

approaches of using Amazon Web Services:

Use Case 1: Run your entire application on AWS: This solution can provide the most bang for your

buck. You can consider moving your entire e-commerce application to AWS or start off by deploying

some of your newer applications to run completely on AWS.

Use Case 2: Run AWS as your extended Data Center (DC): With an existing investment already in

infrastructure, you can consider AWS for your scaling needs. This approach will provide you a safe

mechanism to scale your infrastructure during the holidays and heavy usage times.

Use Case 3: AWS as the Primary site and Existing DC for Disaster Recovery (DR-Hot): You can run your

entire application on AWS to achieve efficiency while still making use of your existing infrastructure for

your Disaster Recovery needs. This way your application has a good failover mechanism.

Use Case 4: AWS for Disaster Recovery (DR-Cold, Warm, Hot): This approach is similar to the earlier

approach, except that, the existing infrastructure acts as your Primary while AWS acts as your DR

option. This provides a low cost and optimized DR solution without disturbing your existing setup.

With this background information about AWS and how it helps your e-commerce business, you are better

prepared to plan your IT for the holidays. Get started NOW!


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Next Steps

For your e-commerce application, if you are considering AWS for achieving scalability, performance,

high availability and cost optimization, take advantage of8KMilescapabilities.

8KMiles is an Amazon Web Services Solution Provider that offers cloud consulting, cloud engineering

and cloud migration services to help companies leverage the power of cloud computing.

8KMiles' services include:

Cloud Consulting and Implementation

Technical Feasibility assessment

Provide a cloud strategy and roadmap for cloud adoption

Design and deploy public, private and hybrid cloud solutions

Cloud Migration Services

Scaling / Load balancing solutions

GEO Distributed Load Balancing

Production Infrastructure setup

Staging / Testing Infrastructure setup

Monitoring solutions

Storage solutions

Cloud application development

Architect and develop custom cloud applications and tools

Application integration with AWS services like Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS , EBS ,

Amazon

SNS , Amazon Elastic MapReduce , Amazon SimpleDB , and Amazon RDS

For more information, visitcloud.8kmiles.comor write to us [email protected]
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