IT infrastructure planning for Thanksgiving and the holiday season is a real challenge for e-commerce companies. A typical e-commerce site sees a 4x to 6x spike in user visits to its website during Thanksgiving (Black Friday and Cyber Monday). You either provision less infrastructure and risk losing out on potential sales on account of your site going down or over-provision and risk having too much of spare capacity later.

1. PREPARE YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR THANKSGIVING:
TAKING E-COMMERCE TO THE CLOUD
Jeff Barr Harish Ganesan
Senior Manager and
CTO and Co-Founder
Evangelist
8KMiles Cloud Solutions
Amazon Web Services

2. Agenda
• Retail E-commerce Landscape – Intro
• Intro to AWS
• Why consider AWS for E-commerce
• Amazon Auto Scaling Demo
• Q&A
Send your questions to webinar@8kmiles.com

3. The Grass is definitely Green! On the
Retail Landscape side
• US E-Commerce is expected to reach
$278.9 billion in 2015
• 5.5 billion new customers shopped online
for the first time in 2010, driving 30% of
the annual online sales
• 83% say they prefer to shop online rather
than go to crowded stores during
Thanksgiving weekend
Forrester US Online Retail Forecast 2010 to 2015

4. Facts about Thanksgiving and
Holiday Season
• Thanksgiving and the holiday season accounts for 60-65% of
annual online sales
• E-Commerce companies see 4X to 6X of normal traffic
• 2010 Black Friday had online sales of 700 million dollars –
Highest Online spending in a day so far!

5. Performance Matters! (More than
Ever)
Gomez 2010

6. What is Amazon Web Services?
Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform that provides flexible,
scalable, and cost-effective technology infrastructure for businesses of all sizes
around the world…
…utilizing the knowledge, expertise, and tools used
to run Amazon.com’s global web properties for over
a decade.

7. AWS Computing Platform

8. AWS is a Safe Bet
• Certifications :
– ISO 27001 , PCI-DSS Level 1, Physical /NW security
• Encryption :
– SSL Endpoints , Encrypted FS
• Access control:
– IAM , Security groups , EC2 instance isolation
• VPN :
– Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

9. E-Commerce: IT Challenges
1. Capacity utilization in normal times
2. Scaling and capacity planning for
peak times
3. Unexpected Demand Surge
4. Lead times for leasing / procurement

10. Online Retail Website - Capacity
Utilization during a typical week

11. E-Commerce: IT Challenges
1. Capacity utilization in normal times
2. Scaling and Capacity planning for
peak times
3. Unexpected Demand Surge
4. Lead times for leasing /procurement

12. Capacity over provisioning during
Holiday Season

13. E-Commerce: IT Challenges
1. Capacity utilization in normal times
2. Scaling and capacity planning for
peak times
3. Unexpected Demand Surge
4. Lead times for leasing /procurement

14. Unexpected Demand Surge during
Holiday season
Opportunity Cost/Total
Impact = [(%Downtime) +
0.3*(%Page Load Times >4
seconds)] * Sales

15. E-Commerce: IT Challenges
1. Capacity utilization in normal times
2. Scaling and capacity planning for peak
times
3. Unexpected Demand Surge
4. Lead times for leasing /procurement

16. Lead Time for leasing / procurement
• Procurement of On-premise hardware
takes over a month on average
• Leasing takes about 2-4 weeks
• Deployment may take longer depending
on the complexity of your architecture
• Plan it in advance (or) front page of news
papers

17. Which translates to the following
questions for IT
–How to address scalability
–How to ensure application is Highly
Available
–How to maintain performance
levels
–How to optimize costs

18. Solution = AWS
• Scalability using Amazon Auto Scaling
• High Availability using Multiple Availability
Zones (AZ) and AWS building blocks
• Performance using CDN, ELB, Caching and DB
• Cost control by pay-for-use model

19. Scalability using Amazon Auto
Scaling
EC2 Instance
Elastic Load
Balancer
… Amazon CloudWatch
Scale Up
Scale Up
Rule
EC2 Instance
Scale
Scale Down
Down
Rule
Scale Up
Predefined
Scaling
Auto Scaling Scale Down Activity
Group

20. Traditional Scaling
• Fixed capacity
• Under utilization of
resources
• Cost Leakage
Amazon Auto Scaling
• Align no. of instances
with demand
• Flexible capacities and
scaling sizes
• Save costs

21. Amazon Auto Scaling benefits
• Dynamically scale fleet of EC2 instances
• Traffic spikes can be handled with ease
• Drive scaling from actual metrics
• Predefined scaling activities:
• Periodic (daily traffic surge)
• One-time (special advertising to drive traffic)

22. Solution = AWS
• Scalability using Amazon Auto Scaling
• High Availability using Multiple Availability
Zones (AZ) and AWS building blocks
• Performance using CDN, ELB, Caching and DB
• Cost control by pay-for-use model

23. Source : AWS

24. 1 Infrastructure is spread across
HTTP/S requests hit the Amazon Load Balancer
from the browser or mobile devices
Multi AZ’s of AWS inside a
Region
AWS Elastic Load balancer
AZ: US-EAST-1a AZ: US-EAST-1c
AWS Security Groups 2 AWS Elastic Load balancer
Web/App EC2 Web/App EC2 directs requests to EC2
instances across Multiple AZ’s
Auto Scaling Auto Scaling
3 Amazon AutoScaling
automatically launches new
Cache Clusters Cache Clusters EC2 instances
across Multiple AZ’s
Read Slave 1 Read Slave 2 4 Amazon RDS is configured
DB Master DB Standby
with Multi AZ Hot Standby
and Read Replica’s
Deployment

25. Leverage AWS Building blocks
• Inherently Fault Tolerant
– Amazon S3
– Amazon CloudFront
– Amazon CloudWatch
– Amazon SimpleDB
– Messaging
• Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• Simple Email Service (SES)

26. Solution = AWS
• Scalability using Autoscaling
• High Availability using Multi AZ and AWS
building blocks
• Performance using CDN, ELB, Caching and
DB
• Cost control by pay-for-use model

27. Content Delivery Networks
• Use Amazon CloudFront to distribute
content with low latency and high data
transfer speeds

28. Source : AWS

29. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• ELB does not ramp up rapidly
– Pre warm your Amazon Elastic Load balancers for
the big day
• SSL offloading on ELB

30. Caching
• Use Caching technologies
– Amazon ElastiCache (beta)
– Memcached / Membase

31. Database performance
• Add Multiple Read Slaves to Relational
Database Service (RDS)
• Scale Up RDS with ease
• Shard RDS (or) RDBMS
• Multiple EBS disks in RAID configuration

32. Solution = AWS
• Scalability using Autoscaling
• High Availability using Multi AZ and AWS
building blocks
• Performance using CDN, ELB, Caching and DB
• Cost control by pay-for-use model

33. AWS is Cost effective
• Cost Flexibility
• On demand
– Pay only for what you use
– No upfront commitments

34. Cost Comparison (Traditional vs. AWS)
$180
$165
$160
Total percentage savings Assumption:
Server Costs (in ‘000
Normal Traffic: 10 quad core servers
$140
during Holiday season by (extra large)
$120
switching to Cloud Holiday Traffic: 50 quad core servers
dollars)
$100
$59
64%
(5 times normal traffic)
$80
$60 On AWS:
$33 $33 $33 18 hours of Peak Traffic
$40
6 hours of Normal Traffic
$20
$15 $15 $15
$-
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
Traditional Hosting Amazon Web Services
With AWS you can keep Costs low:
- Move from Cap-ex to Op-ex
- Scale on-demand (no upfront commitments)

35. AWS use cases for E-commerce apps
• Run your entire application on AWS
• Run AWS as your extended Data Center (DC)
• AWS as Primary site and Existing DC for
Disaster Recovery (DR-Hot )
• AWS for Disaster Recovery (DR-Cold, Warm,
Hot)

36. AWS Infrastructure Existing Data Center
Production Production
Content Web Services Inventory
Search
SOAP, Rest , JSON
Order Management
Catalog Payment
Recommendations Fulfillment
Social apps Customer Service
FTP , SFTP , SSH
Shopping
Analytics
Comparisons
Amazon VPC
Mobile Site
Others
Browse only site
Test/Dev Infra
Configuration Mgmt

37. AWS benefits for IT
• Scale capacity on demand
• Derive value from good architecture
• No fear of lost sales because of slow load
times or server being unavailable
• Focus on product and business
• Turn fixed costs into variable costs
• Cost Effective

38. Summary
• AWS is the right fit for e-commerce applications
• AWS provides cost-effective infrastructure to
handle any level of traffic
• Multiple approaches and use cases to leverage
AWS in addition to existing IT
• Architecture is critical
• Time to get started for this season is NOW

39. 8KMiles - Who we are
• Amazon Web Services Partner
• Help companies leverage Cloud Computing
• Expertise across the entire suite of AWS products
• Team of experts located in United States, India &
Singapore

40. Q&A
8KMiles
cloud.8KMiles.com
Call: 636-544-8413
cloud@8KMiles.com
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com/contact-us/aws-sales

41. Thank You!