High Availability of Web Apps for eCommerce Starts with Real-Time Flow Analysis Xangati Blog Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing
March 11, 2015
Xangati Blog The network is the platform: it’s the underpinning of the IT infrastructure that touches everything, from email to financials to corporate and e-commerce web sites. Years of layering on advanced technologies, like unified communications and virtualized data centers, on top of the core IT infrastructure have added levels of complexity, making it sometimes difficult to determine where the bottlenecks are in terms of high availability and performance.
With the advent of Infrastructure-as-a-Services (Iaas), compute, storage and networking power that is essentially leased in the cloud like a utility, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), on-line development environments in which applications are developed innately in and for the cloud, the iterative problem of how well your web applications perform, degrade with security controls turned on, and avoid traditional latency buffers, has become front and center as the primary choke point to mitigate endpoint quality of service concerns. So while you may know high availability of applications is a technical issue that you want to keep off your 99-problem list, what are the business implications that justify web app performance mechanisms to mitigate inadvertent degradation by legacy IT infrastructure liabilities?
Xangati Blog Opportunity losses of web app downtime: Perhaps the most obvious and damaging cost of downtime, for example to e-commerce retailers, is lost revenue associated with a customer’s inability to conduct transactions during an outage. Target.com, for example, has experienced multiple outages. There were also at least two outages during the 2013 holiday season, one of which (according to Rigor) lasted for about two and one-half hours. Rigor used its Uptime Percentage Calculator (located on the Rigor homepage) to determine the outage represented a loss to Target of about $464,000 for 2.5 hours of web ecommerce downtime. In 2013, Amazon.com went down for roughly 25 minutes — costing the e-commerce giant approximately $1,104 of revenue per second. Of the top cloud outages in 2014, three were e-commerce web site related: Adobe Creative Cloud, Verizon Wireless and Microsoft Azure. Opportunity gains of web app uptime: The most important task to ensure app HA is to prioritize ahead of time what applications are mission critical, and indeed, business critical, as a secondary priority, well in advance; properly provisioned, your virtual infrastructure performance tool can determine in real time what service assurance is required to keep web apps up and running, with standard operational response times at the endpoint access layer.
Xangati Blog With application maintenance costs increasing every year on average by 20%, ensuring that your web apps that ring the register are optimized with real-time performance metrics, versus run-thebusiness and legacy applications, or even rogue applications, is a critical strategic planning imperative and a sound investment protection maneuver. Business value of redundancy: Many contemporary web apps are born digital, that is either virtualized in a hypervisor or brokered via a public cloud (IaaS) platform, so they more than any others should also account for HA redundancy, in the same sense that disaster recovery architectures create exact mirrors of the IT infrastructure, so too should your web apps benefit from a DRaaS backup system in the event of first-level failure, so that all of your web apps can be raised and provisioned in minutes to hours. Application HA data: Running applications through ADC load balancer technology like Citrix NetScaler also delivers the benefit of very rich web-app health status data not just in terms of performance but also across the entire user base with granular access, that make performance monitoring service levels easier but also aggregates data that can contribute to how usage instances are charged for, making SLAs much more predictive for a managed service provider.
Xangati Blog High availability of e-commerce web applications has to be a top priority for enterprises and organizations of all sizes. Whether the task is to avoid complete loss of a service or mitigate potential degradation of a service’s performance, HA web app performance solutions rely on the fundamental principle of supplying the real-time data stream necessary to assure resiliency and redundancy to possible points of failure while maintaining high standards of reliability.
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