Member Article

Cloud Bursting Can Help Retailers Maximize Holiday Revenue

The term Black Friday is inseparably associated with crowds eagerly waiting outside of stores for the doors to open, but the original meaning is slightly different —it was the day on which retail businesses moved out of the red and into the black. The final quarter of the year is the busiest shopping season and it’s where most retail businesses make their profit. The same is as true of eCommerce stores as it was of brick-and-mortar. Retailers need to get customers through the door in quantity over the holiday period to remain viable.

For eCommerce retailers, getting customers through the door isn’t literal, but the techniques are the same. Promotions, an advertising blitz, new products, and seasonal demand make the eCommerce retailer’s year. Unfortunately, the extra traffic generated by Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the run-up to Christmas is exactly what will kill an online store that isn’t properly optimized for performance. It’s one of the great ironies for smaller eCommerce retailers: getting too much of what they want can lead to their store failing to perform at all.

That failure to perform, to provide a fast, responsive eCommerce experience for holiday shoppers, can be avoided with careful planning. One of the best tools currently available for retailers to shore up their stores against the seasonal deluge is cloud bursting.

The public cloud has a practically endless supply of compute and storage resources that can be put at the disposal of eCommerce retailers. It’s a far better option than investing in sufficient physical infrastructure to accommodate peak traffic, because those resources will sit idle for most of the year. Cloud resources are inexpensive, elastic, scalable, and you’ll only pay for what you use.

In essence, cloud bursting is simple. Some workloads are shifted onto cloud platforms during periods of peak load to maintain performance and an adequate shopping experience.

According to Martin Walshaw, “Cloud bursting abstracts the application delivery requirements from the underlying infrastructure. This enables the applications to span physical and virtual infrastructure in the data centre and the cloud, as demand dictates.”

The reality of cloud bursting is more complex; it takes considerable advanced planning and preparation to pull it off well. However, eCommerce is particularly well suited to cloud bursting. Most eCommerce stores are a combination of a front-end web interface connecting with a back-end database and a logic layer that ties the two together.

It’s relatively straightforward to reproduce some of those components of an eCommerce store for short periods of maximum load. An obvious example is the front-end, which often comprises a web server and PHP (or other language) application. Web servers can be duplicated for redundancy and performance and situated behind one or more load balancers. To the load balancers, it doesn’t matter where the web servers are running — on physical infrastructure or in the cloud. With a load balanced cluster of cloud servers handling traffic spikes, retailers can give their customers the fastest possible experience. And, because it’s the cloud, adding new web servers is almost trivially easy. Similar configurations can be used to move database servers, file servers, and the other components of an eCommerce store into the cloud for periods of peak load.

Cloud bursting can offer retailers the best of both worlds: fast responsive stores and tightly controlled spending on the infrastructure they need, when they need it.

About William - Will Hayles is a technical writer and blogger for Outscale, a leading cloud hosting provider in the USA and France.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Will Hayles .