nomorerack CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY WITH FAST GROWTH IN THE CLOUD

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1 nomorerack RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY WITH FAST GROWTH IN THE CLOUD CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY Nomorerack is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the US with 1023% growth in revenue and 15-20x traffic peaks in the holiday season. Nomorerack used RDS and was hitting the limits of scale. They struggled with availability costing $20,000 - $60,000, with getting insight into database issues and timely support. Clustrix Database as a Service (DBaaS) has provided better availability, higher performance and significantly better support.

2 omorerack is one of the fastest N growing e-commerce companies in the US. According to the company - nomorerack is the online shopping destination for those who want quality brand named apparel and accessories for up to 90% off retail! We offer an incredible variety of amazing authentic designer merchandise, fantastic products and cool trendy items through exciting short term daily deals. We give our customers unbeatable deals on fabulous products each and every day - making nomorerack the best and most trusted choice for finding the lowest prices on 100% authentic items! Nomorerack offers low prices by working directly with suppliers to put consumers closer to the products they buy, offering an average of 70 to 80 percent off everything from consumer electronics to clothing. Revenue for nomorerack.com Inc. spiked 1023% year over year in 2012, giving the flash-sale retailer the secondfastest growth rate in Internet Retailer s Top 500 Guide, behind Groupon Inc. and ahead of such merchants as Fab. com and Nasty Gal Inc. Social media is a key driver for nomorerack s success, and a perfect platform for them to engage and connect with their loyal customer base. 2

3 Fast growth with peak workloads THE IDEAL CLOUD APPLICATION Primary database options in AWS In AWS, for customers who want a scale-out database that can scale beyond the capacity that single node database such as RDS can offer, there are two options. The customers can spin up nodes using AWS Marketplace. Customers who want the performance and reliability of physical hardware can use Optimized Appliance in Equinix datacenter connected using DirectConnect. AWS Virtual Machines Nomorerack runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud computing is the perfect fit for the company. With nomorerack s fast growth and peak workloads, the flexibility and scale-out growth of the cloud is essential. The merchandise available can quickly become popular and sales spike during the holidays. During the holiday season nomorerack experiences huge spikes in traffic that are 15 to 20 times higher than normal. The company also has a corresponding 15 to 20 times higher spike in revenue, making website availability and performance during this time extremely important. needs to scale quickly to handle the new load. Application Serveres connect to single RDS node with limited scalability Application Servers in AWS East running in Equinix using DirectConnect for the highest in performance and availability. AWS Virtual Machines AWS Virtual Machines DirectConnect Application Servers connect to scale-out running on AWS VMs for better scalability Equinix Datacenter in US East 3

4 NOMORERACK APPLICATION AND THE DATABASE WORKLOAD The nomorerack application is interesting for customers because they can go to the website everyday and find something new. New deals appear frequently, most deals are only available for a day and the pricing keeps changing. The nomorerack application has three primary parts and each one uses the database extensively. The first part - Storefront - has all the product information, product details, purchase information and all the customer account information. The second part is the CRM system for managing customer relationships. This has the customer data and customer purchase history. The third part is the vendor portal which is designed to be a self-serve system that enables vendors to directly push their deals. Vendors can upload new product deals, and the portal has a marketing engine and a built-in invoice and fulfillment system. In keeping with the growing trend in e-commerce of having heavier real-time analytics and reporting on the primary database, the nomorerack application has extensive reporting and more complex analytics. Various statistics are maintained in the system and live analytics dashboards help management see what s going on right now in the business, such as the hourly revenue. In addition, multiple nightly reports are generated during the overnight hours. The query rate is consistently more than 10,000 TPS, and peaks of 15x to 20x occur during the holiday season. The analytical queries can join many large tables, include complex subqueries, and include a lot of aggregates and sorts looking at huge volumes of data. 4

5 This is an example inventory query that joins 11 tables, has a subquery and five way aggregation and a sort

6 An example report looking at daily deals that are still available THE ENVIRONMENT AND CHALLENGES The nomorerack website is written in PHP and the application uses Ruby on Rails though the company is moving away from Rails. They also have Redis as a caching layer that is being replaced with MongoDB. The primary database was RDS MySQL provided by AWS. nomorerack was running into these challenges with RDS: A couple of instances of downtime lasting several hours cost the company $20,000 to $60,000 per hour, depending on the hour of the day A limit of one master database No ability to move data out of RDS with replication, which the company s application needs. A The writes were slow and issues occurred with disk performance. Higher IOPS helped somewhat, but performance issues remained. Lack of visibility into performance issues. Assistance from Amazon took a long time, and even then the answers were not much help. The company wanted better redundancy and availability. 6

7 HOW CLUSTRIX SOLVED THE PROBLEM Move to Clustrix Database as a Service (DBaaS) As a fast growing company with large and growing database workload nomorerack wanted high availability and the best performance. They liked the Clustrix cluster of database nodes with high availability built-in that is superior to the master-slave architecture used by MySQL. They chose Clustrix due to higher performance and the ability to use all the nodes in the cluster for queries. Also, if any issues occur, the company would be able to get better insight into the cause and have the ability to quickly address them. Nomorerack considered hosting their own MySQL instance but it was going to be more expensive and they would need to have someone to stay on top of it. Nomorerack went with the Clustrx DBaaS option. Clustrix DBaaS includes Optimized Appliance nodes (CLX4110) housed in a partner data center. For nomorerack, it was housed in the Equinix datacenter in US East that also houses AWS in US East. The application is then connected to the database hardware nodes through a DirectConnect provided by AWS. However, being located in the same datacenter means that you get very low latency. Certain queries that were optimized for MySQL needed some changes to obtain better performance with Clustrix. performance with Clustrix. Clustrix DBaaS Support The support with Clustrix DBaaS has a significant support value add element to it. Clustrix manages the servers and the upgrades. Clustrix support monitors the workload constantly and helps resolve any issues that show up. They also look at expensive queries that are causing excessive workload and suggest improvements. Keith Bussey, VP of Technology at nomorerack.com said - Clustrix DBaaS requires no server management that is the same as RDS, but we get much better Enterprise level support that is better and faster than RDS. He added The support is 24/7 and we get a reply immediately anytime during night or day. Support is helping by identifying queries that can be improved for performance and we re mostly bound by manpower on nomorerack side to implement them. The Future Nomorerack is now looking forward to a great holiday season knowing they have a database they can rely on and a support team that will be with them through it. The new trend they re seeing is that mobile is growing quickly as a percentage of revenue as more and more people use mobile devices rather than their computers to shop. Nomorerack is busy adding features for mobile instead of worrying about their database, and we re excited to see them growing so quickly. 7

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