Online ‘flash sale’ retailer manages smooth transition to virtualisation with traffic management system
Online ‘flash sale’ retailer manages smooth transition to virtualisation with traffic management system
With millions of unique visitors to their website and over 5,000 requests per second during peak periods, Gilt Groupe could lose a large percentage of their daily profits in just ten minutes of downtime during their daily sale.
The members-only discount shopping site was looking for the best way to grow fast with the increasing rate of traffic. It quickly decided that moving to a cloud computing-based environment would provide the flexibility, scalability and speed of deployment it needed.
With Gilt Groupe already using traffic management systems from provider Zeus in its physical environment, it realised that the software-based solution would also be able to move with it onto the cloud platform it had chosen. Phong Nguyen, founder and vice president of research and development at Gilt Groupe, explained: “A virtualised Zeus solution made a lot of sense – we could set up additional servers in minutes and also run more redundancy across a larger number of physical servers.”
Simplifying move into the cloud
Gilt Groupe faced several challenges in moving its architecture into a cloud environment, but the Zeus solution was not one of them. “With all the complexity of moving from a hosted environment to a full cloud environment, we were pleasantly surprised to see just how simple the Zeus components were to operate. Everything worked well, from details like SSL Certificates to preventing fault tolerance in the cluster,” said Nguyen.
Using the Zeus subscription model enabled the company to roll out a larger number of Zeus servers. Nguyen continued: “We implemented a multi-tier, service oriented architecture, with multiple independent clusters, all managed from Zeus. This allows us to manage all aspects of the infrastructure with a common, reliable load balancer and content cache. The service oriented architecture splits data sources into various different pools. We use Zeus to o all the routing and in some cases manage the authentication to the services.”
A hybrid model for customer security
To be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant, Gilt Groupe continued using two of its Zeus servers in a data centre environment, deploying the Zeus Application Firewall Module to handle all payment and credit card requests. Nguyen added: “With Zeus, we were able to lock down sensitive data and satisfy PCI DSS compliance.”
Specialised caching through Zeus has also decreased the latency and increases the speed, performance and overall user experience of Gilt Groupe’s website. Cached content is placed as close to the user as possible, reducing trips to the back-end servers to retrieve data. In California, for example, customers are seeing improved page load times because much of the dynamic content can now be served from a cloud closer to those customers.
“Zeus is phenomenal in terms of the number of page requests it can serve per second,” Nguyen adds. “On the West Coast, where we currently operate a small cluster of three Zeus Traffic Managers, we can deliver over 100,000 requests per second. Zeus helps us prepare for larger traffic spikes as our business grows.”
Gilt Groupe also saw an immediate cost reduction as it was able to de-commission servers as soon as it started using Zeus in the cloud. Over the year, a combination of the Zeus Content Caching and the service-orientated architecture has reduced the back-end server requirement by 50%.
Nguyen concluded: “Our traffic skyrockets at noon every day, so without Zeus we’d have to implement things differently. While the server pools decreased, we saw our traffic triple within the year. “With the pages loading so much faster, we started seeing even more traffic. And the graphs in Zeus’ user interface allow us to see all traffic in real-time and track the increases, which helps us to plan for future provisioning. Zeus is an integral part of our architecture and an extension of our application.”
