eCommerce in the Cloud

Preface

Among all enterprise workloads, ecommerce is unique because of the extreme variability in traffic. The chart in Figure 1 shows the number of page views per second over the course of the month of November for a leading US retailer.^[1]

Figure 1. November page views for a leading US retailer

The amount of hardware required varies substantially over the course of a month, day, or even hour, yet provisioning a production environment to 500% of annual peak for the entire year is common. A large US retailer recently sold $250 million online over a seven-day period, yet their CPU utilization, which is their bottleneck, never topped 15%.

Having spent my career deploying large ($1 billion+/year in annual revenue) ecommerce platforms and later building the technology under these platforms, I am always struck by the fear-driven inefficiencies and fashion-driven dogmatism that permeates every aspect of our trade. Aside from being wasteful, the real problem is distraction from your core business. We are at a juncture in history where a fundamental change is required. We can do better than the status quo.

Cloud computing, having matured over the past decade, is now to the point where it can finally be used for large-scale ecommerce. Cloud offers the promise to scale up and down dynamically to match your real-time needs. You pay for only what you need and you can use as much as you want. The ...