New report by cloud performance experts aims to dispel myth that only systems run in-house can provide the speed needed for retailers
New report by cloud performance experts aims to dispel myth that only systems run in-house can provide the speed needed for retailers
Cloud hosted e-commerce platforms can be as fast as conventional hosting environments, and the technology is more reliable too, a new report by cloud performance experts Intechnica has claimed.
The report, called How Fast is the Cloud? also highlighted that, when the total cost of ownership is considered, the cloud is a competitive solution that retailers cannot ignore.
Retailers are still debating the pros and cons of the cloud, however recent examples have reenergised the debate. Topical case studies include fashion retail Reiss, which crashed after The Duchess of Cambridge wore one of its dresses, sending thousands of extra visitors to its web domain.
E-commerce infrastructure priorities
Intechnica undertook the research because it wanted to prove that performance and good design matters. Over half (57%) of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting three seconds for a site to load and 80% will not return, so maximising performance is business critical.
The organisation undertook the testing by installing an open source, e-commerce application onto four different infrastructures: Azure, AWS, VMWare and physical servers.
The specification of each environment was kept as similar as possible, and Intechnica ensured they remained largely “out of the box”: Intechnica installed the open source, e-commerce application onto the four different cloud infrastructures.
The consultancy said the application was chosen, since it represented the two-tier application infrastructure common in many business applications. Also, as the application was built on the .NET framework, and had already been ported to Azure, it meant that it was supported by all of its target infrastructures.
The researchers ran a series of performance tests, using Intechnica’s TrafficSpike tool to simulate key business transactions, including a mix of page browsing, searching and transactional processes. They also used a series of standard monitoring techniques, analysing page response times as well as key system counters relating to the performance of the web and database servers.
After studying the findings, Intechnica made four key recommendations to retailers considering the cloud:
- The cloud is different to conventional physical hosting environments, and it requires intelligent upfront and ongoing management to maximise the benefits and avoid the pitfalls
- Not all cloud solutions are the same; consequently, they need to be considered separately and dealt with differently to achieve optimum performance.
- Applications need to be designed or modified specifically for the cloud – simply migrating conventionally hosted applications is likely to result in failure.
- The cloud is a liberating and enabling technology: businesses can have confidence to conduct proofs of concept, and take greater risks with technology choices without the fear of large costs, significant deployment of resources and long-term commitments to third parties.
Cloud offers viable alternative
Phil Horn, business development manager at Intechnica, said” “Our How Fast is the Cloud? report proves that the cloud can be just as fast if not faster than conventional hosting options. The exercise also demonstrated that good performance comes by design, planning and good management, not by accident.
“For retailers with revenue-generating websites, there is a direct correlation between performance and revenue. If a site is not performing, then it is losing money. More and more business critical functions are being carried out online; the impact of poor performance or failure of these systems could be catastrophic.
“Downtime for an e-commerce led business can have catastrophic ramifications for revenue and can seriously damage a business’s reputation. As well as speed issues, the cloud is better positioned to deal with spikes in traffic.
“In our tests, Microsoft Azure and our VMWare public cloud both performed well, while Amazon EC2 (AWS) performed the least well of our four environments. This in no way suggests that AWS is the least ‘good’ cloud option; in different test conditions using a different application, AWS is quite likely to outperform the rest of the group. In fact, with some minor changes to the environment taking just a few hours, we were able to improve AWS results by 57%.”
