Choxi (Formally nomorerack.com) Reliability and Availability with fast growth in the cloud Customer Success Story 2nd fastest growing e-tailer on Internet Retailer Top 100 600% increase in sales on Cyber Monday 20X spike in loads over holidays flex feature handled it all never slowed down or crashed. Choxi is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies in the United States, with 1,023% growth in revenue and 15 20x traffic peaks in the holiday season. Choxi previously used RDS and was hitting the limits of scale, struggling with availability and heavy downtime cost, and not getting insight into database issues or timely support. has provided better availability, higher performance, and significantly better support. To handle their 600% spike in Cyber Monday sales they scaled from 6 servers to 14 servers with no downtime.
Choxi is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the US. According to the company, Choxi is the online shopping destination for those who want quality brand name 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 Choxi the best and most trusted choice for finding the lowest prices on 100% authentic items! Choxi 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 Choxi.com spiked 1023% year over year in 2012, giving the flash-sale retailer the second-fastest 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 Choxi s success, and a perfect platform for them to engage and connect with their loyal customer base. 2 Clustrix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Fast growth with peak workloads THE IDEAL CLOUD APPLICATION Primary database options in AWS AWS customers who want a scale-out database that can scale beyond the capacity that a single node database such as RDS have two options: 1) Spin up nodes using AWS Marketplace. 2) Use the Optimized Appliance in Equinix datacenter connected using DirectConnect for the highest performance and reliability Application Servers connect to single RDS node with limited scalability. AWS Virtual Machines Choxi runs in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud computing is the perfect fit for the company. With Choxi s fast growth and peak workloads, the flexibility and scaleout growth of the cloud is essential. The merchandise available can quickly become popular and sales can spike 20 times or more during the holidays. Of course this corresponds with an equivalent spike in revenue, making website availability and performance during this time extremely important. on AMI AWS Virtual Machines on AMI on AMI Application Servers connect to scale-out running on AWS VMs for better scalability. Equinix Datacenter in US East AWS Virtual Machines Application Servers in AWS East running in Equinix using DirectConnect for the highest in performance and availability. DirectConnect 3
CHOXI APPLICATION AND THE DATABASE WORKLOAD The Choxi 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 Choxi 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. Query Query Query Query database, the Choxi 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 reports are generated during the overnight hours. The query rate is consistently more than 10,000 TPS, and peaks of 15 to 20 times 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. In keeping with the growing trend in e-commerce of having heavier real-time analytics and reporting on the primary 4 Clustrix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This is an example inventory query that joins 11 tables, has a subquery, five way aggregation and a sort. 5
An example report looking at daily deals that are still available. THE ENVIRONMENT AND CHALLENGES The Choxi 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. Choxi 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. 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 Clustrix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
HOW CLUSTRIX SOLVED THE PROBLEM Move to As a fast growing company with a large and growing database workload, Choxi wanted high availability and the best performance. They liked the cluster of database nodes with high availability built-in that is superior to the master-slave architecture used by MySQL. They chose 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. Choxi considered hosting their own MySQL instance, but it was going to be more expensive and they would need someone to stay on top of it. Choxi went with the on servers. The application is then connected to the database hardware nodes through 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. Support The support with has a significant value-add element to it. Clustrix manages the upgrades. Clustrix support 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 Choxi.com said, 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, night or day. Support is also helping us by identifying queries that can be improved for performance. Choxi Sails Through 600% Revenue Spike Choxi has the ability to flexibly scale up or scale down by adding or removing nodes. Cyber Monday gives the company their biggest spike in web traffic for the year, and every minute of downtime represents enormous lost revenue. Here is how Clustrix support worked with Choxi to get them through the holidays: During the holiday period, Choxi informed us that marketing impressions would be increased 20-fold, with an expected click-thru rate of 0.35%. Using only these two metrics compared with STATD data from a previous campaign, we projected the holiday peak to reach 370% more visitors and 170% higher CPU usage. Because scales exceptionally well with higher concurrency, we recommended that Choxi add 8 new servers to the existing 6 server cluster. The 14-node cluster handled the holiday load without any issues. In summary, Choxi was able to handle a 3x spike in database load by simply adding nodes to their cluster a very straightforward operation. Estimating a three-fold increase in website traffic for the 2014 holiday season, Choxi expanded their deployment from eight to 18 servers. As a result, the company easily handled record holiday shopping traffic and achieved 60 percent increase in net revenue. 7
Clustrix provides the leading scale-out SQL database engineered for the cloud and the first database built specifically to meet the revenue scaling, performance and availability demands of today s e-commerce sites. With, you can build business critical applications that support massive transactional volume and real-time reporting of business performance metrics. delivers more than one trillion transactions per month for customers including AOL, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, Choxi, Photobox, Rakuten, and Symantec. Headquartered in San Francisco, Clustrix is funded by HighBar Partners, Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Don Listwin, and ATA Ventures. is available in software that runs on commodity hardware and on any cloud. : Making sure e-commerce sites never slow down or crash: ecommerce.clustrix.com San Francisco, CA +1 415.501.9560 info@clustrix.com Clustrix, Inc. All Rights Reserved.