eCommerce in the Cloud

Chapter 10. Deploying Across Multiple Data Centers (Multimaster)

The focus of this chapter is taking a single ecommerce platform and running it out of two or more physical data centers that are geographically separated from each other. While the assumption is that these data centers are within a cloud, most of the principles discussed are applicable to traditional hosting arrangements. We’ll start by discussing the fundamental problem of running eCommerce from multiple data centers, the architecture principles underpinning distributed computing, how to assign customers to individual data centers, and finally the various approaches to operating from multiple data centers.

Many ecommerce vendors already operate out of two data centers in some capacity to ensure the highest possible availability. This trend will only accelerate over the coming years as ecommerce platforms are becoming increasingly important to business. In today’s omnichannel world, an outage increasingly has the effect of shutting down every single channel you have for generating revenue. It used to be that a website failure would, of course, be unpleasant but it was isolated to that channel. Now, many point-of-sale systems, kiosks, and mobile applications, all use the same underlying platform. Outages today tend to be platform-wide and thus affect all channels.

Tip

Next to a security breach, an extended outage or repeated outages are the surest way to become unemployed.

Deploying the same platform across two or more ...