Preparing Your IT for the Holidays A quick start guide to take your e-commerce to the Cloud September 2011
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 1
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 of 4 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. 2
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 Amazon s 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). - Pay-per-use nature of AWS services results in cost effective IT infrastructure. 3
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 network s 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. 4
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. 5
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 one or 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. 6
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 doesn t match supply. 7
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. 8
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. 9
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 payas-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) 10
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. 11
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. 12
Address Cost optimization 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 ondemand). 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. 13
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 your servers. 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! 14
Next Steps For your e-commerce application, if you are considering AWS for achieving scalability, performance, high availability and cost optimization, take advantage of 8KMiles capabilities. 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, visit cloud.8kmiles.com or write to us at 15