Don’t Let Your Shoppers Drop; 5 Rules for Today’s Ecommerce A guide for ecommerce teams comprised of line-of-business managers and IT managers
White Paper BY DATASTAX CORPORATION
AUGUST 2013
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Table of Contents
Abstract 3
Introduction 3
Ecommerce Demands Have Changed 3
The 5 Rules for Today’s ecommerce 4 Rule 1. Plan for Disaster 4
Success Story - Netflix 5 Rule 2. Plan for Success 5
Success Story – RightScale and Adobe 7 Rule 3. Plan to Make Each Customer Feel Unique 7
Success Story – Datafiniti 8 Rule 4. Plan to Gain and Keep Customer Trust 8
Success Story – Thomson Reuters 8 Rule 5. Plan to Future-Proof Your Business 8
Success Story - Ooyala 8 Future-proof Ecommerce for Less 9
Why DataStax Enterprise for Ecommerce? 9 Use Cases Handled by DataStax Enterprise 10
Conclusion 11
About DataStax 11
Abstract The definition of ecommerce has dramatically expanded to include non-retail environments, with all smart businesses tailoring and marketing their products and services at the individual customer level. Meeting the increasing demands of customer-facing line-of-business applications greatly depends on the databases supporting them. This paper, written with a blend of information for the line-of-business manager and the IT professional, discusses the five key rules of great ecommerce and the changes they require in your database infrastructure.
Introduction The definition of ecommerce has dramatically expanded to include non-retail environments. Even banks need to think of their customer-facing online application as an ecommerce site. For example, what if you noticed from a customer’s banking transactions that he was paying for dues at a children’s gymnastics studio? You could surmise in real time that he has children in his life, and your page could instantly offer him college-savings products. Another example: you could improve how your company communicates with customers by keeping track of what portions of your ecommerce page a user clicks on, in the order they click. Looking at this information could help you better design your page and tailor your recommendation engines for different personas. Plus, there are even somewhat unexpected benefits to looking at your ecommerce sites in this way; you can connect formerly siloed data sources (such as customer purchases, demographics, shipping records and accounts receivable), all communicating with each other in real time, so you can detect fraud more quickly and easily. This means you need to change how you think about applications. To start you thinking about what this means to your ecommerce application, remember that ecommerce pages are often based on many pieces of data of different kinds (user profile, item details, community comments, recommendation or advertising for other products, shopping cart, and so on). You need the right technology to reduce the total rendering time of such a page by making it easy to send many requests in parallel. When you reduce the rendering time, your customers experience instant results on their searches and better recommendations that arrive instantly, which leads to higher sales and better customer loyalty. In this paper, you’ll learn how DataStax Enterprise, powered by Apache Cassandra™, drives some of the most successful ecommerce applications in the world. Various modern enterprises using DataStax Enterprise will be profiled such as Netflix, Ooyala, and Adobe with summaries of how each are using NoSQL technology to power key aspects of their ecommerce business.
Ecommerce Demands Have Changed First generation ecommerce systems were typically built with relational database technology. But today, changes in how customers want to do business and the competitive landscape have changed the rules of the game so that today’s online applications need to:
• Keep the business always online and serving customers. • Serve customers everywhere (that is, in multiple locations). • Handle fast incoming information that’s of varying types.
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• Handle constantly increasing customer demand. • Protect sensitive information that runs the business. • Make quick business decisions based on right information. • Deliver very strong payback for IT investments.
In addition to these business needs, customers also expect to search for what they want, no matter what type of site they are on, and they expect highly customized recommendations based on real-time information. Shopping carts must never lose intended purchases, and web pages must deliver consistently fast performance. At the same time, ecommerce teams tend to need to help drive product and service prices as low as possible, so ecommerce websites must reduce costs wherever they can. Let’s quickly visualize what all of this means in terms of data technology change:
Yesterday’s ecommerce applications Today’s ecommerce applications
Slow and low-volume data / purge often Fast and high volume data / retain forever
Data coming in from one or a few locations Data coming in from many locations
Rigid, static, structured data Flexible, fluid, multi-type data
Deploy app central location / one server Deploy app everywhere / many servers
Write data in one location Write data everywhere, anywhere
Downtime tolerated Downtime not tolerated
The 5 Rules for Today’s ecommerce The rules for today’s ecommerce are derived from changing and growing demands being placed on all customer-facing line-of-business applications, not simply those in traditional retail companies. The top 5 rules for creating great ecommerce systems today are the following:
1. Plan for disaster 2. Plan for success 3. Plan to make each customer feel unique 4. Plan to gain and keep customer trust 5. Plan to future-proof your business
Rule 1. Plan for Disaster Your online applications simply cannot go down as the monetary loss to the business and to customer satisfaction is simply too high. The need for high availability has been replace by the requirement for continuous availability. Cassandra provides continuous availability through its ‘masterless’ architecture and is able to operate across multiple data centers and cloud availability zones so that an entire region can be lost due to a natural disaster without your online applications experiencing downtime. With Cassandra, you don’t recover from disasters – you avoid them altogether.
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Success Story - Netflix Netflix relies on Cassandra’s performance and availability across multiple cloud zones to achieve constant uptime, something they couldn’t accomplish with legacy relational database solutions. More than 95% of Netflix’s data is stored in Cassandra (much of it previously on Oracle). Commenting on a major Amazon outage that occurred in Oct 2012, the team at Netflix wrote in their technical blog: “We configure all our clusters to use a replication factor of three, with each replica located in a different Availability Zone. This allowed Cassandra to handle the outage remarkably well. When a single zone became unavailable, we didn't need to do anything. Cassandra routed requests around the unavailable zone and when it recovered, the ring was repaired.”1
Rule 2. Plan for Success Rule #2 involves planning for success so you can meet demand for one visitor or one million. Your application must be always available, and that depends on more than disaster avoidance. It also requires elastic scalability so you can meet needs as customer traffic ebbs and flows, and sudden spikes in demand occur. Cassandra, which powers DataStax Enterprise, scales in an online fashion so extra capacity can easily be added in a transparent manner when necessary. Cassandra’s built-for-scale architecture means that it is capable of handling petabytes of information and thousands of concurrent users/operations per second (across multiple data centers) as easily as it can manage much smaller amounts of data and user traffic, with continuous availability. Further, Cassandra greatly outperforms other NoSQL databases like HBase and MongoDB in many use cases. This fact has been confirmed in a number of independent benchmarks. For example, engineers at the University of Toronto conducted a 2012 benchmark and found Apache Cassandra the “clear winner throughout our experiments”2, End Point Corporation, a database and open source consulting company, performed a benchmark of three top NoSQL databases – Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and MongoDB – using a variety of different workloads on AWS. As can be seen in the following graphics, Cassandra outperformed MongoDB and HBase by a wide margin.
1 http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/10/post-mortem-of-october-222012-aws.html 2 Solving Big Data Challenges for Enterprise Application Performance Management, Tilman Rable, et al., August 2012
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Figure 1. Load Process
Figure 2. Read-Write-Mix Workload
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Figure 3. Read-Modify-Write Workload
More details can be obtained on the Endpoint benchmark by reviewing the white paper, Benchmarking Top NoSQL Databases.3
Success Story – RightScale and Adobe Enterprise-scale performance means that companies like RightScale can keep its customers in contact with each other all over the world. RightScale accomplishes this via DataStax clusters in more than five global data centers, with Cassandra’s architecture making that easy. Another company needing high performance and easy scale to meet customer requirements is Adobe, with its marketing cloud application. Adobe relies on DataStax Enterprise, running in multiple data centers, to deliver on stringent response-time requirements (< 12ms or less for 95% of requests), with ever-fluctuating demand.
Rule 3. Plan to Make Each Customer Feel Unique Successful ecommerce depends on making each customer feel unique. In today’s environment, it’s not enough to be continuously available to your customers. You have to let them search for exactly what they want, analyze their behaviors, and be able to recommend the right products and services to them. DataStax Enterprise provides built-in analytics and enterprise search capabilities so that customer data can be analyzed at the same time that customer search operations are occurring. Each workload is isolated and separate so one does not affect the other and high performance is guaranteed.
3 http://www.datastax.com/resources/whitepapers/benchmarking-top-nosql-databases
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Success Story – Datafiniti Datafiniti, which is a search engine for data, needs to consume lots of data in real time and provide fast search on top of the same data. Datafiniti uses the operational simplicity and integration of DataStax so it can easy consume large volumes of data while at the same time providing fast search on that same data so their customers can easily find the information they want to buy.
Rule 4. Plan to Gain and Keep Customer Trust Rule number 4 concerns a key area of great ecommerce – not jeopardizing your customers’ sensitive information or violating their privacy. Recent history demonstrates well that when customer data is compromised, the business loses customer trust and eventually the customer’s business. To prevent this from occurring, DataStax offers the most comprehensive set of data security features offered by any NoSQL provider. The security features of DataStax Enterprise include:
• Internal authentication, which makes it easy to manage who can access your database. • External authentication, providing support for the widely trusted security package
Kerberos. • Permission management that controls who can perform certain tasks in your database. • Transparent data encryption, which encrypts sensitive data so that it can’t be stolen and
accessed by data thieves. • Data auditing that provides the ability to understand everything that’s taken place in
your database. • Client to node encryption, which protects data as it’s in flight from clients to the
database.
Success Story – Thomson Reuters This is a level of enterprise security that satisfies even the toughest requirements, like those of Thomson Reuters: “Security is very important to us, so we’re naturally very pleased to see all the new security features in DataStax Enterprise 3. Its scalability and performance are enabling us to develop an exciting financial data analytics platform that will create a better experience for our audience.”
Rule 5. Plan to Future-Proof Your Business As an IT business owner, you need to avoid the risk of being left behind because you couldn’t see which markets to enter, or because it was too hard for your systems to scale. By future-proofing your modern applications with NoSQL technology like DataStax Enterprise, you can expand capacity when needed without business interruption, and scale to handle new product lines, new markets, and more.
Success Story - Ooyala The most innovative companies partner with DataStax so they know their modern applications will meet the unknown, but ever growing, demands of the future. Companies like Ooyala can grow confidently, thanks to their relationship with DataStax. Ooyala processes hundreds of TB’s of data, about two billion events per day and 200 million unique users per month. Ooyala relies on the flexible architecture of DataStax Enterprise because they “couldn’t shoehorn RDBMS technology.” The company manages hundreds of nodes with a very small operations team of three people. More about Ooyala can be learned by reading the online DataStax case study.4
4 http://www.datastax.com/resources/casestudies/ooyala
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Future-proof Ecommerce for Less Ease of use. Better manageability. Superior technology. Integration and certified for production. World class support. Lower software costs. Commodity hardware capabilities. Cloud and physical deployments. Nimble operational team functionality. Unparalleled performance. All of this means you get a better return on investment, not only saving costs to improve the bottom line, but growing the top line in ways you may not have ever imagined. What would this do for your ecommerce environment?
Why DataStax Enterprise for Ecommerce? As we’ve discussed, DataStax Enterprise is an enterprise NoSQL platform powered by Apache Cassandra that lets you scale with no surprises and keep your applications running, no matter what. Plus, its integrated platform gives you operational simplicity for managing real-time, analytic, and enterprise search data all in the same database cluster DataStax Enterprise consists of three components:
1. DataStax Enterprise Server, an enterprise-class NoSQL data management platform that uses Apache Cassandra for real-time data management, Hadoop for batch analytics, and Apache Solr for enterprise search operations.
2. OpsCenter Enterprise, which is a visual, browser-based management tool that allows administrators to manage all database clusters, whether they are on premise, across multiple data centers, or in the cloud, from a single interface.
3. Expert support, which is delivered by the NoSQL professionals at DataStax and includes around-the-clock coverage.
The benefits delivered by DataStax Enterprise can be summarized as follows: Feature Benefit Production-Certified Cassandra Apache Cassandra is a massively scalable NoSQL database that is an
acknowledged industry leader at handling today’s line-of-business systems. DataStax certifies a version of Cassandra for its big data platform via lengthy testing, benchmarking, validation with 3rd party software, and defect resolution to ensure a chosen version is ready for production environments.
Analytics with Hadoop The integrated Hadoop distribution is one that is built on top of Cassandra and therefore allows the ability to run Hadoop analytics on data stored in Cassandra.
Enterprise search with Solr Solr, the most popular open source search platform, is enhanced by running on top of Cassandra so that it is completely fault tolerant, scales well, and runs across multiple data centers with ease.
Workload Separation/Isolation The mixed workload problem is solved in the platform as no workload (real time, analytics, search) competes with any other for compute resources; all are isolated and yet integrated together.
No Need for ETL The need to extract-transform-load data from real time to analytic to search systems goes away as built-in replication keeps all data domains in sync.
Easy Data Migration Migrating data from existing RDBMS systems is easy via built-in migration utilities. Third party migration tools also support the platform.
Simple Log Integration Application logging data is easily consumed via logging interfaces, and then can be analyzed with Hadoop or searched via Solr.
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Enterprise Management Control Administrators are instantly productive and save time with OpsCenter Enterprise, which allows management of all database clusters within a single interface.
Expert Support Professional, around-the-clock support ensures questions get quickly answered and help is available to ensure applications stay online.
Cost Efficient Cost reductions over typical RDBMS vendors routinely run 80%.
Use Cases Handled by DataStax Enterprise Because DataStax Enterprise is a comprehensive and integrated big data platform, it can handle line-of-business use cases that have real-time, batch analytics, and enterprise search requirements. DataStax Enterprise handles use cases as such as the following: Real-Time:
• Time series data • Device/Sensor/Data “exhaust” systems • Distributed applications • Media streaming • Online Web retail (transactional, shopping carts, etc.) • Real-time data analytics • Social media capture and analysis • Web click-stream analysis • Write-intensive transactional systems
Batch Analytics:
• Buyer behavior analytics • Compliance/regulatory analysis • Customer recommendation output • Fraud detection • Risk analysis • Sales program campaign analysis • Supply chain analytics • Batch Web clickstream analysis
Enterprise Search:
• General Web search • Web retail faceted (categorization) search • Search/hit prioritization and highlighting • Application log search and analysis • Document (PDF, MS Word, etc.) search and analysis • Geospatial search • Real estate location and property search • Social media match ups
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Conclusion It is possible for nearly any kind of business to offer a new kind of customer service by thinking of their customer-facing online line-of-business applications as ecommerce hubs. Doing so means that you design the applications and power them with the right database platform so that they follow the five rules for today’s ecommerce, which are:
• Rule #1. Plan for disaster. Don’t just recover from it -- Avoid it altogether. • Rule #2. Plan for success – scale without surprises so you can always meet customer
demand. • Rule #3. Plan to make each customer feel unique – meet the needs of a million
customers, one-by-one, by leveraging your hot customer data in context. • Rule #4. Plan to gain and keep customer trust – do so by protecting customer data. • Rule #5. Plan to future-proof your business – avoid the risk of being left behind because
you couldn’t see which markets to enter, or it was too hard for you to scale. DataStax Enterprise gives you the performance, scale, and developer flexibility your ecommerce team needs to follow these five rules in today’s competitive environment. For more information about DataStax Enterprise Edition, visit www.datastax.com for downloads, online documentation, and more. Note that you can download DataStax Enterprise Edition and evaluate it free of charge in development environments with no restrictions (e.g. data size, RAM, CPU, etc.). Production deployments do require that a subscription be purchased. For information on subscription pricing, please send an email to DataStax at [email protected].
About DataStax DataStax provides a massively scalable enterprise NoSQL platform to run mission-critical business applications for some of the world’s most innovative and data-intensive enterprises. Powered by the open source Apache Cassandra™ database, DataStax delivers a fully distributed, continuously available platform that is faster to deploy and less expensive to maintain than other database platforms. DataStax has more than 300 customers including leaders such as Netflix, Rackspace, Pearson Education, and Constant Contact, and spans verticals including web, financial services, telecommunications, logistics, and government. Based in San Mateo, Calif., DataStax is backed by industry-leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meritech Capital, Next World Capital, Scale Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, and Crosslink Capital. For more information, visit www.datastax.com.
