Scaling for E-Business

4.2. Infrastructure

The infrastructure of an electronic business identifies the functionalities of the hardware and software components, specifies the corresponding service level requirements, and describes the management and operation of the whole system [20]. The infrastructure is usually shared by many applications that rely on the components of the infrastructure and management procedures (e.g., software distribution, backup, recovery, and capacity planning) to provide reliable and efficient services to customers. Commerce servers, transaction servers, database servers, and Web servers are typical software components used by e-business applications. Hardware components include standard pieces such as servers and networks as well as specialized ...