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  • Driving E-Commerce Transformation with Microservices

    Driving E-Commerce Transformation with Microservices

    It’s no surprise that COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation, but just how fast these changes have occurred is incredible. According to recent research, companies have accelerated their share of digital or digitally enabled products by up to seven years.

    These changes are impacting every sector in every region around the world, but they are being felt acutely by companies that sell their solutions online—which I imagine includes your company. To thrive in the new normal of digital commerce, businesses need to be supported by a fast, flexible technology architecture that can adapt to new products and go-to-market strategies and can be spun up on the fly. The best—and really, the only—way to do that is with a microservices architecture.

    Why Monolithic Architectures are Uniquely Bad for Commerce

    While monolithic architectures can be simple to develop, test, and deploy, their limitations, especially in the age of digital, quickly become apparent. Software becomes too large and complex to make changes quickly, or correctly. Bugs can be a disaster, and monolithic architectures are often a barrier to adopting new technologies since any change requires significant time and monetary investment to update the entire application.

    These limitations are even more glaring in the age of subscriptions. In today’s market, if you are selling products or services online, you are likely offering subscriptions. In fact, 95% of companies offer at least one subscription-based product. For subscription commerce businesses, the need for microservices architecture is even more critical. A recurring revenue strategy requires frequent adjustments and easy integration with other systems, requirements that a monolithic architecture often can’t accommodate.

    Scale Is the Critical Factor

    One of the greatest benefits of a microservices architecture is the ability to scale quickly. Monolithic architectures are much more rigid because everything has to be scaled at the same time. In contrast, a microservices architecture allows organizations to scale individual components of an application to meet niche use cases. Moreover, because microservices give you the freedom to update individual components, organizations can make changes without any interruption to broader systems. In other words, with a microservices architecture, developers are able to upgrade the airplane while it’s in flight.

    There’s internal scale, but external scale through ecosystems is also an important consideration. Recent research found that 56% of executives believe engaging in ecosystems is the most effective way to access new markets, while 55% believe that the new capabilities gained from partnering are essential to building new capabilities. Ecosystem participation—whether as an operator or a participant—requires timely integration and development, a reality that monolithic architectures just cannot support.

    Microservices as a Recruitment Tool

    Innovation and digital transformation aren’t just business needs. They can also be one of the most powerful recruiting tools available to draw in the best talent. The job market is rife with opportunity for prospective employees—especially now, during the Great Resignation, where a significant number of employees are looking to change jobs—and businesses need to embrace every advantage they can to attract top talent.

    Legacy technology can have its place, but it can also be a red flag for job candidates. Most developers want to join an organization that values innovation and gives them the freedom to build unique products and solve meaningful business problems, which microservices development offers. A microservices architecture can also make onboarding new talent easier, since developers aren’t obligated to learn every facet of the architecture. It’s a win for new employees and existing organizations alike.

    Driving Transformation Through Microservices

    The needs of any given business are always changing, but digital and subscription commerce businesses have proven to be extraordinarily dynamic. Monolithic architectures of the past simply aren’t equipped to power digital transformation or support commerce businesses when they emerge on the other side. Microservices may come in a smaller “package,” but they will deliver much bigger benefits to your business in the long run.

  • Progressive Web Apps are Taking Over the Mobile Web

    Progressive Web Apps are Taking Over the Mobile Web

    Consumers now spend most of their time on their mobiles, that’s no secret. And with 4G networks now the norm in both developed and developing markets, people have every reason to expect their mobile experiences will be as good as PC-based ones.

    But they aren’t for the most part. Mobile web is 49% of all online traffic, but mobile conversions remain painfully low at only 1.7%. This is a sobering statistic, particularly for companies who are under growing pressure to stay relevant as customer behavior continues to evolve.

    Part of the issue comes down to limitations in the user experience on mobile (i.e. smaller screens), but the bigger factor is speed. According to Google, 53% of users will bounce off a web page that takes more than three seconds to load. And yet, the average homepage still takes 15 seconds to load on a mobile phone.

    Unless a customer feels an extreme sense of urgency to make their purchase, it’s unlikely they will endure the pain of waiting for page after page to load as they try to get through a purchase selection and checkout process on their phone. Neither are they likely to immediately put down their phone and dig out their laptop to complete the transaction.

    Welcome to the Progressive Web

    Enter progressive web apps (PWAs), the future of mobile web experiences.

    While responsive web design (RWD) made most websites usable on a phone sized screen, the actual experience of interaction has proven too slow and clunky when compared to the same website on a PC. In response, many brands have developed their own mobile apps, hoping to win customers over with a smoother and more convenient service. However, aside from niche businesses with a high-touch, loyal customer-base, such as Starbucks and Facebook, most brands have spent a great deal of time making apps that are moderately successful at best, not to mention the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in development costs.

    PWAs represent a significant leap forward because they allow companies to deliver the user-friendliness and page load speeds of a native app, but directly from the company’s mobile website. PWAs also make it possible for developers to create online experiences that don’t just adjust to different screen sizes but can interact with device features (such as Camera, GPS and push-notifications) creating streamlined experiences that are optimized based on which device a customer is using. The result is a more consistent experience across devices, with no features lost.

    Most importantly, at a time when the war for attention has never been more intense, with PWAs, web pages load in a fraction of the time, keeping customers engaged rather than testing their patience and driving them to competitor sites.

    Take the Financial Times, a company proving PWAs can have a major impact on conversion. The FT recently went the PWA route to keep pace with surging web traffic.

    “One of our key metrics was speed. We determined if we made the site just one second faster, it increases engagement by 5%, and would ultimately add millions of dollars to our bottom line due to increased ad views,” said Cait O’Riordan, chief product and information officer at the FT.

    Analyst houses Forrester and Gartner are also bullish on PWAs. Forrester went as far as to say there is no longer a point in arguing over which kind of mobile app is best–native or hybrid–because with PWAs taking off, nobody will bother using apps soon. Even among airlines, whose apps are some of the most useful and commonly downloaded, progressive web is seen as the future.

    “Apps are a temporary necessity in the development of better mobile experiences,” admitted Scott Wilson, vice president of eCommerce merchandising at United.

    Democratizing Mobile Access

    In addition to supporting faster and more responsive mobile experiences, PWAs also make access to these experiences more democratic. This is particularly relevant in emerging markets such as India and Indonesia, where consumers have limited data allowances on their phones due to high costs.

    Until now, this has stopped customers from downloading multiple apps. It has also limited people’s ability to engage with brands because, for many, mobile is their only portal to the internet. This is all set to change with PWAs.

    PWAs demand a fraction of the data compared with traditional apps while offering nearly the same quality of experience, eliminating the access barrier and delivering a win-win for merchants and customers alike.

    Why Now?

    It’s no surprise the world’s leading brands, from BMW to Starbucks, have already deployed PWAs or are on the verge of doing so. Starbucks’s mobile app has long been viewed as a gold standard for customer experience and loyalty programs, but even the world’s biggest coffee chain understands PWAs are the way forward.

    The wider move toward progressive web will begin in earnest over the next year. More organizations have come to appreciate the revenue risk of getting left behind and have begun to prepare for a PWAs push between now and 2025. Five years from now, mobile will easily account for 60-70% of web traffic, and customers will not hesitate to funnel towards mobile sites that work quickly and reliably. As the disruption of the past decade has shown us, heritage is no guarantee of loyalty when it comes to digital experiences.

    Of course, the transition to PWAs can’t be accomplished overnight. It is a major strategic transformation that requires brands to take on a front-end rebuild of their websites. It’s also worth noting PWAs development costs can be on-par with those for a mobile app. However, unlike apps that need multiple versions for iOS and Android and require frequent updates on their respective app stores, PWAs are simply an evolution of existing open web technologies that make the web a better place both on mobile and desktop. The opportunity cost of becoming a laggard on the web is much higher than the investment cost of building a PWA.

    PWAs will soon be the foundation of all digital commerce globally, and the rollouts planned over the next few years will see leading brands set a new minimum standard for customer experience. Google already added a mobile speed score to its search result rankings algorithm in 2018, and there is widespread consensus that page load times and PWA compliance will only carry more weight in Google’s rankings as more people abandon their PCs for mobile devices.

    Customers around the world are also ready for better mobile experiences. With PWAs, brands will gain access to technology that will help them satisfy their customers’ appetite for speedy web experiences–and the race to capitalize has begun.

    — Peter Sheldon

  • Spot Instances on Black Friday: A Case Study

    Spot Instances on Black Friday: A Case Study

    Businesses made the right choice using spot instances for Black Friday

    Black Friday is the unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season, when retailers announce exciting deals to attract as many customers as they can into their stores. With online shopping surging in recent years, e-commerce and AdTech businesses are also participating in Black Friday to increase their online presence and revenues. Today, millions of customers have the choice of shopping online or in brick-and-mortar stores. While these stores have their challenges managing massive amounts of shoppers, e-commerce and AdTech businesses are dealing with their own set of challenges when it comes to handling shopper traffic.

    Source: Business Insider

    During peak shopping days such as Black Friday, businesses use significantly more capacity to process online shopper requests while constantly trying to provide them optimal performance. In theory, as more companies utilize resources from a cloud provider, they may experience a capacity shortage when trying to scale. When a busy online shopping day finally approaches, this theory can become a reality as online retailers scale to meet their shoppers’ demands and cloud providers struggle to accommodate capacity. However, what many cloud users may not know is that about 50 percent of the major cloud vendors’ infrastructure is mostly idle.

    To be clear, this is not because AWS, Microsoft or Google are struggling to sell their capacity; it’s because they have to be ready for rapid increases in usage—just like the one businesses experience during Black Friday.

    The fear of insufficient capacity also has made users apprehensive to use cloud providers’ excess capacity such as spot instances to run their workloads, since many customers are using more cloud resources and are eating all of the cloud inventory. Businesses simply do not want to take a chance trying to compete for excess capacity and opt for something more predictable, such as on-demand instances. The fact that cloud providers are capable of handling the most aggressive computing demands has created a situation in which businesses that chose to make intelligent use of excess capacity during Black Friday saw great returns on their investments.

    Events such as Black Friday, national elections and the Super Bowl are pretty extreme stress tests for any consumer-facing business. We thought it would interesting to go through the data and see how the AWS spot market behaved during Black Friday, and see what we can learn from it. In this blog post, I will go over the spot market statistics and lessons learned from 2018’s Black Friday.

    Spot Markets and Statistics

    Spot markets are defined as the supply and demand for a specific instance type at a specific spot price in an availability zone. Spotinst Elastigroup ranks spot markets for availability and costs from current and historical data in a process called Spot Market Scoring. Spot Market Scoring enables us to predict an instance interruption in a market approximately 15 minutes before it happens (sometimes even more than an hour). This advance notification on upcoming interruptions is what triggers the spot instance replacement and ensures the continuous availability of compute workloads. Let’s see how the spot markets behaved before and after Black Friday.

    Now that you have a better understanding of the spot market, let’s delve into the statistics from Black Friday. In the image below, we can see the number of spot interruptions for each Friday three months prior to Black Friday in the us-west-1 and us-east-1 region. The us-east-1 region had significantly more spot interruptions during this period.

    The graph below shows the number of spot interruptions that occurred a week before and after Black Friday in us-east-1 and us-west-1 across all instance types. We can see that us-west-1 was more reliable for spot instances than us-east-1. Also, us-east-1 continued to experience more outages the week after Black Friday.

    We then took a look at popular instance types and sizes used before, on and after Black Friday to see how many interruptions there were. In the image below, we can see that c4.4xlarge had the highest number of interruptions and incrementally improved after.

    The section below shows metrics for Back Friday in comparison across different availability zones in us-east-1 and us-west-2:

    1. Total Spot Interruptions this Black Friday in the US: 462
    2. Breaking down the Interruptions by Availability Zones, some had more Spot interruptions than others
    Availability Zone us-east-1 us-west-2
    AZ 1 29 1
    AZ 2 3 7
    AZ 3 24 3
    1. Average Spot Uptime: 2675 Minutes (1.8 days)

    What Spot Interruptions and Autoscaling Events Look like

    Let’s examine what a spot market interruption looks like and how Elastigroup handles the situation. In the data below, you can see an actual event log from one of our customers.We can see that early on Black Friday, the day started with Elastigroup automatically replacing terminated or soon-to-be-terminated instances. A little later, as shoppers began scavenging the internet for deals, we see that the instances were automatically scaled up to meet demand. Elastigroup scaled down the instances the following day because demand was not as high as on Black Friday. With this type of autoscaling automation in Elastigroup, administrators can spend more time worrying about application development and other tasks.

    Takeaways

    1. DevOps Automation is Key – Elastigroup uses predictive algorithms to identify and drain instances that are about to be terminated. Prior to termination, Elastigroup will launch a new instance and replace it seamlessly. Elastigroup will also make sure to distribute your instances across different types to optimize costs and longevity.
    2. Spot Instance Availability – Having a stable uptime is crucial for peak days such as Black Friday. With millions of shoppers visiting e-commerce sites, an outage can result in revenue loss. On Black Friday, the small number of spot instances that experienced interruptions had an average uptime of 1.8 days. With that uptime, organizations can rely on spot instances managed by Elastigroup to reduce costs while not sacrificing service availability during peak times.
    3. Spot Market – Spots allow businesses to make better decisions without sacrificing costs and availability. Elastigroup reliably leverages the spot market to optimize your underlying infrastructure for cost, without compromising availability. Per the statistics above, we can see that some availability zones had more spot terminations than others. AZ 1 in us-east-1 had the highest number of spot interruptions.

    — Amiram Shachar

  • Using MongoDB for a Product Catalog Application

    Using MongoDB for a Product Catalog Application

    In today’s era of data-driven business, enterprises are continuously adopting new technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Distributed and cloud databases is one such technology. These databases are fundamentally different from relational databases, offering scalability, availability and flexible data models that are beyond the capabilities of traditional relational databases.

    MongoDB is one of the leading next-generation scale-out databases. It is a document-oriented database that provides dynamic schemas, making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster. MongoDB also provides easy scaling through auto-sharding, tunable consistency for reads and built-in replication.

    In this blog, I will describe an application, product catalog management, that distinctly benefits from features MongoDB offers.

    Most e-commerce enterprises need a product catalog with the ability to store varied types of objects with different sets of attributes. These kinds of data collections are quite compatible with MongoDB, which can offer dynamic queries on a constantly changing dataset.  However, it is important to understand the major requirements of industry verticals such as retail, media and entertainment, insurance, health care and e-commerce that are addressed by MongoDB before designing an optimal data model and for your own product catalog.

    For example, Ebay offers several use cases in which MongoDB has been implemented successfully and has delivered much value for its product catalog:

    • Product Availability – Being a JSON document store, not only can MongoDB help in complex querying of a product catalog in real time but it also can keep track of placed orders to accurately calculate the available quantity for popular products. The data is important from customer service point of view, as it keeps them aware of available choices at the time of order placement and prevents order cancellations later due to non fulfillment.
    • Dynamic Pricing – Product prices change quite frequently in the online world. E-commerce enterprises need to keep pace with these fluctuations and dynamically adjust product prices to retain their existing customer base. MongoDB helps tremendously through its ability to update data on live sites without shutting down/restarting any systems. On top of that, ability to run geospatial queries using geospatial index allows the sites to show converted pricing and taxes based on the location of their customers. The example below shows how to find all theatres within 10 miles of a location using a geospatial query.

    db.theatres.find({ location:
    { $geoWithin:
    { $centerSphere: [ [ <longitude> , <latitude> ], 10 / 3963.2 ] } } })

    • Shipping Estimation – Today’s customers enjoy the convenience of shopping online at home but also demand the flexibility to control the delivery of their products. Some customers will pay extra money for expedited delivery while others are content with waiting longer to pay no shipping costs. The ability to provide correct shipping costs and time estimates is a critical functionality for e-commerce applications. Again, MongoDB comes to rescue with its geospatial queries to calculate correct shipping estimates based on the locations of the user and the inventory.
    • Personalized experience – E-commerce enterprises want their customers to enjoy the online shopping experience by understanding their needs as well as their social profile. This allows them to provide every single user with a personalized version of the site, which can be based on their past order history and their interaction with the company via stores, customer service and social media. Not only that, e-commerce enterprises run applications that recommend new products based on customers’ indicated preferences. MongoDB is being used by online retailers such as Otto to consume data from multiple sources and build customized catalog experiences for individual e-commerce customers.
    • Sales/Discounts – To engage their customers at the next level, e-commerce enterprises have built capabilities to develop customized discount offerings. This can be done via “flash sales” that allow customers to buy their coveted products at lower prices within the constraints of quantity, time and minimum spend. MongoDB has been the with technology of choice here as well (for example GILT Groupe) because it can keep track of time-bound and volume-bound parameters in real time to make such deals successful.

    ecommerceIt can be argued that e-commerce industry and dynamic product catalogs have been in existence for a long time. So, how is MongoDB changing the landscape? The answer lies in the rapidly evolving landscape of customer buying patterns. Today, a wait of an extra minute often means losing customers and revenue to the next best online competitor. Always-on applications are a norm and scalable infrastructure is a must-have requirement. Hence, MongoDB is helping enterprises to meet their changing business needs.

    However, product catalog applications generally require consolidating data from disparate sources and present a uniform view to customers. This also makes the underlying database, MongoDB, prone to logical and human errors. Hence, a highly available data protection infrastructure that can guarantee minimal data loss (low recovery point objective and recovery time objective) is required to keep online retail engines running. Further, certain catalog portions could be updated more frequently such as perishable goods; hence, those databases need to be backed up every hour versus the slow-moving goods.

    The data protection system should provide enough flexibility to set backup policies per the business requirements (granularity, etc.).