eCommerce in the Cloud: Bringing Elasticity to eCommerce

by Kelly Goetsch

Overview

Is your eCommerce solution ready for the cloud? This practical guide shows experienced and aspiring web architects alike how to adopt cloud computing incrementally, using public Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. You will learn how to marshal as much capacity as you need to handle peak holiday or special-event traffic.

Written by eCommerce expert Kelly Goetsch, this book helps architects leverage recent technological advances that have made it possible to run an entire enterprise-level eCommerce platform from a cloud.

• Explore cloud service models: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service
• Learn about public, hybrid, and private cloud deployment models
• Understand the impact of omnichannel retailing on platform and deployment architectures
• Build an auto-scaling solution that can quickly add or subtract hardware in response to real-time traffic
• Re-apply what you already know about security to the cloud
• Run a single eCommerce platform from multiple data centers, including several forms of multi-master
• Build a hybrid solution or deploy your entire platform to the cloud
• Learn application and deployment architecture for "cloud native" through legacy eCommerce platforms
• Use Software-as-a-Service for eCommerce, including Content Delivery Networks and Global Site Load Balancing services

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491946633
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/18/2014
Pages:	283
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Kelly Goetsch works in product management and focuses upon the technology that underpins large-scale eCommerce. Previously, Kelly served in senior level implementation roles at some of the largest eCommerce properties in the world. He has published extensively on topics including distributed computing, eCommerce application architecture, and performance tuning. He holds a M.S. in M.I.S. and a B.S. in Entrepreneurship from the Universityof Illinois.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction xv

Part I The Changing eCommerce Landscape

1 The Global Rise of eCommerce 3

Increasing Use of Technology 4

Internet Connectivity 4

Internet-Enabled Devices 5

Inherent Advantages of eCommerce 5

Price Advantage 5

Convenience 6

Large Product Assortment 7

Technological Advances 8

Closer Tie-in with the Physical World 8

Increasing Maturity of eCommerce Offerings 10

Changing Face of Retail 19

Omnichannel Retailing 22

Business Impact of Omnichannel 25

Technical Impact of Omnichannel 26

Summary 29

2 How Is Enterprise eCommerce Deployed Today? 31

Current Deployment Architecture 32

DNS 33

Intra Data Center Load Balancing 34

Web Servers 35

eCommerce Applications 39

Application Servers 41

Databases 42

Hosting 44

Limitations of Current Deployment Architecture 46

Static Provisioning 46

Scaling for Peaks 47

Outages Due to Rapid Scaling 50

Summary 51

Part II The Rise of Cloud Computing

3 What Is Cloud Computing? 55

Generally Accepted Definition 55

Elastic 57

On Demand 58

Metered 59

Service Models 61

Software-as-a-Service 62

Platform-as-a-Service 64

Infrastructure-as-a-Service 65

Deployment Models 66

Public Cloud 67

Hybrid Cloud 67

Private Cloud 68

Hardware Used in Clouds 69

Hardware Sizing 70

Complementary Cloud Vendor Offerings 71

Challenges with Public Clouds 73

Availability 73

Performance 74

Oversubscription 77

Cost 78

Summary 79

4 Auto-Scaling in the Cloud 81

What Is Auto-Scaling? 81

What Needs to Be Provisioned 82

What Can't Be Provisioned 84

When to Provision 84

Proactive Provisioning 85

Reactive Provisioning 86

Auto-Scaling Solutions 87

Requirements for a Solution 88

Building an Auto-scaling Solution 91

Building versus Buying an Auto-Scaling Solution 93

Summary 94

5 Installing Software on Newly Provisioned Hardware 95

What Is a Deployment Unit? 95

Approaches to Building Deployment Units 97

Building from Snapshots 97

Building from Archives 99

Building from Source 101

Monitoring the Health of a Deployment Unit 103

Lifecycle Management 107

Summary 108

6 Virtualization in the Cloud 109

What Is Virtualization? 110

Full Virtualization 110

Paravirtualization (Operating System-Assisted Virtualization) 112

Operating System Virtualization 113

Summary of Virtualization Approaches 115

Improving the Performance of Software Executed on a Hypervisor 116

Summary 119

7 Content Delivery Networks 121

What Is a CDN? 123

Are CDNs Clouds? 124

Serving Static Content 125

Serving Dynamic Content 128

Caching Entire Pages 129

Pre-fetching Static Content 132

Security 133

Additional CDN Offerings 135

Frontend Optimization 135

DNS/GSLB 136

Throttling 138

Summary 139

Part III To the Cloud!

8 Architecture Principles for the Cloud 143

Why Is eCommerce Unique? 143

Revenue Generation 143

Visibility 144

Traffic Spikiness 144

Security 144

Statefulness 144

What Is Scalability? 146

Throughput 146

Scaling Up 147

Scaling Out 148

Rules for Scaling 149

Technical Rules 150

Nontechnical Rules 160

9 Security for the Cloud 163

General Security Principles 165

Adopting an Information Security Management System 166

PCI DSS 167

ISO 27001 169

FedRAMP 170

Security Best Practices 171

Defense in Depth 172

Information Classification 173

Isolation 174

Identification, Authentication, and Authorization 175

Audit Logging 176

Security Principles for eCommerce 177

Security Principles for the Cloud 179

Reducing Attack Vectors 180

Protecting Data in Motion 183

Protecting Data at Rest 185

Summary 186

10 Deploying Across Multiple Data Centers (Multimaster) 187

The Central Problem of Operating from Multiple Data Centers 189

Architecture Principles 190

Principles Governing Distributed Computing 191

Selecting a Data Center 195

Initializing Each Data Center 96

Removing Singletons 196

Never Replicate Configuration 197

Assigning Customers to Data Centers 198

DNS 198

Global Server Load Balancing 201

Approaches to Operating from Multiple Data Centers 205

Active/Passive 205

Active/Active Application Tiers, Active/Passive Database Tiers 207

Active/Active Application Tiers, Mostly Active/Active Database Tiers 208

Full Active/Active 210

Stateless Frontends, Stateful Backends 211

Review of Approaches 212

Summary 213

11 Hybrid Cloud 215

Hybrid Cloud as a By-product of Architecture for Omnichannel 217

Connecting to the Cloud 222

Public Internet 223

VPN 223

Direct Connections 223

Approaches to Hybrid Cloud 224

Caching Entire Pages 224

Overlaying HTML on Cached Pages 227

Using Content Delivery Networks to Insert HTML 229

Overlaying HTML on the Server Side 230

Fully Decoupled Frontends and Backends 231

Everything but the Database in the Cloud 233

Summary 234

12 Exclusively Using a Public Cloud 237

Why Full Cloud? 237

Business Reasons 237

Technical Reasons 238

Why Not Full Cloud? 239

Path to the Cloud 241

Architecture for Full Cloud 243

Review of Key Principles 243

Architecture for Omnichannel 245

Larger Trends Influencing eCommerce Architecture 246

How to Select a Cloud Vendor 247

Summary 248

Index 249