eCommerce in the Cloud

Chapter 12. Exclusively Using a Public Cloud

Deploying your entire ecommerce platform to a cloud, or as much as possible, is the future of ecommerce. We’re rapidly moving away from an era where software is deployed in-house on dedicated hardware that you or someone else manages. Cloud computing is revolutionary to business because it commoditizes computing power in much the same way that public utilities have commoditized power and water. Tapping computing power allows you to focus on your core competency of, say, selling apparel, rather than building and maintaining infrastructure. The overall lower costs and shift from capital to operational expenditures is equally transformational.

In Chapter 3, we discussed the various service models (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service) and deployment models (public, hybrid, and private). This chapter focuses on public deployment models, with either IaaS or PaaS being the service model. Let’s review why you would want to deploy your entire platform to a cloud.

Why Full Cloud?

Business Reasons

Full cloud, whereby your entire platform is deployed in a cloud, is more revolutionary to your business than it is from a purely technology standpoint. The more you use a cloud, the more benefits you realize. Even using it for just preproduction will yield substantial benefits.

The first and most salient argument for a full cloud solution is that it frees you up to focus on your core competency. Building and maintaining ...