In today’s competitive online retail environment, building a cloud or platform to enable eCommerce workloads requires a consistent high-performance, scalable storage system to streamline and manage important business data.
eCommerce platform engineers responsible for technology in retail are fast-moving towards cloud-like architectures to keep pace with capacity and application performance demands. Software-defined storage architected for NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP) has emerged as a solution to fulfill their technical and business requirements.
In this blog, I outline various aspects of IT infrastructure for eCommerce.
Overview
- Why a high-performance, scalable IT infrastructure is required to accelerate eCommerce
- Challenges faced by eCommerce platform engineers
- Software-defined is the foundation for modern data center technology in retail
- The implications of open source Ceph in retail infrastructure technology
- Real-world eCommerce use case
- Future trends in data center technology for retail
Why a high-performance, scalable IT infrastructure is required to accelerate eCommerce
Electronic Commerce, or eCommerce, has revolutionized the way businesses operate and consumers shop, providing a digital platform for transactions and interactions. eCommerce encompasses a wide range of activities and components, from online storefronts and marketplaces to digital services and B2B transactions that include secure payment gateways, inventory management systems, and order processing mechanisms.
The backbone of eCommerce is a consistent high-performance data platform that ensures the efficient storage and management of data, transactions, and user interactions. Technology infrastructure in retail needs fast delivery of data, agility, and flexibility to adapt to the dynamic and growing nature of online business operations. That means a retail technology infrastructure with scalability on demand and high performance. The storage system plays a critical role and must have the scalability, performance, fast response time, flexibility, and efficiency to support a multitude of workloads:
- Data Volume and Variety:
- Product Information: extensive product catalogs, with images, descriptions, and specifications for each item.
- API Integration: The integration for partners who sell on your platform to insert, update, and delete their products.
- User Data: Customer profiles, preferences, and purchase histories are stored in large databases that demand efficient storage and retrieval mechanisms.
- Transaction Processing:
- Real-time Transactions: high performance with high throughput ensures that numerous transactions can be processed simultaneously without delays or disruptions.
- Payment Processing: Robust security measures, including data encryption and secure connections, are crucial to gaining and maintaining customer trust, especially considering the sensitive nature of personal and financial information.
- User Experience:
- Fast Load Times: a system with low latency is essential for quick page load times, contributing to a positive user experience. Slow loading can lead to higher bounce rates and decreased customer satisfaction.
- Personalization: architecture for AI/Ml workloads is outside the scope of this blog, but platform engineers should consider storage systems that future-proof their platform and can grow, scale, and adapt to future workload requirements.
- Seasonal Peaks and Traffic Surges: the demand on eCommerce platforms peaks during sales events, promotions, or holiday seasons. A dynamic, scalable infrastructure allows businesses to scale up or scale down resources while handling sudden increases in user activity without performance degradation.
Challenges faced by eCommerce platform engineers
When architecting a data platform for eCommerce, platform engineers can encounter a range of challenges due to the fundamental variations in IT technology solutions for online retail. Scalability is a foremost concern when architecting a system that responds dynamically to varying levels of end-user demand. Performance optimization is often listed as a close second concern, ensuring optimal performance for a seamless user digital experience while handling high volumes of concurrent transactions and data processing.
Cost optimization is coming to the forefront in a lot of customer interactions and is a perpetual challenge. Platform engineers will not want to compromise the end-user experience for cost efficiency. Cost optimization strategies will be different whether the eCommerce platform is built on-premises or a hyperscaler. More details on cost-optimization strategies later in the blog. Resource utilization is a relative of cost optimization, striking the right balance in resource allocation to prevent bottlenecks, optimize hardware usage, and minimize idle capacity is a constant challenge in on-premises cloud infrastructure. Security and disaster recovery (DR) strategies are also top concerns, but I will not cover either in much detail in this blog.
Software-defined is the foundation for modern data center technology in retail
eCommerce platform engineers that we work with are modernizing and future-proofing their platforms by software-defined storage (SDS). SDS abstracts storage management from the underlying hardware, allowing for greater flexibility and adaptability enabling the allocation of storage resources to where and when they are needed. This flexibility is essential in eCommerce, where workloads vary, and scalability is crucial for accommodating growth or fluctuations in demand.
Storage provisioning can be automated with SDS, streamlining tasks such as data migration, replication, and storage allocation. This efficiency not only saves time but also money by reducing storage administration overhead. Automation is especially beneficial for large-scale eCommerce platforms, ensuring consistent and reliable storage operations. The other cost-efficiency benefit of SDS is that it reduces dependence on expensive, vendor-specific hardware. Additionally, SDS enables the pooling and efficient utilization of storage resources, avoiding overprovisioning and ensuring that resources are allocated based on actual needs, leading to improved cost efficiency in online retail operations.
When SDS is coupled with an NVMe/TCP architecture, you have a winning future-proof combination for eCommerce. NVMe/TCP offers the lowest latencies compared to traditional storage protocols, like iSCSI and FibreChannel. It utilizes the standard TCP/IP networking protocol, meaning there is no requirement for complex networking components, which simplifies deployments and integrations while reducing TCO and complexity.
Lightbits software-defined storage architected for NVMe/TCP offers the high-performance, scalability, and flexibility that enables eCommerce platforms to accelerate application performance, and lower storage costs while offering the flexibility to allocate and provision resources as needed.
The implications of open source Ceph in retail infrastructure technology
Another software-defined storage solution is Red Hat Ceph which is open-source. It’s based on a decentralized architecture, unifying object storage, block storage, and file storage under one platform. With features like data redundancy, fault tolerance, and dynamic scalability, Red Hat Ceph is a choice for platform engineers seeking performance and scale. However, I would caution platform engineers to consider the comprehensive network infrastructure required to fully use all of Ceph’s functionalities, which would require additional engineering oversight to implement and manage. For some organizations, the complexity introduced by Ceph may have a negative impact on the IT budget and storage system TCO. The negative implications on efficiency, complexity, and budget could outweigh the performance benefits. Another key aspect of Ceph to consider is that if you are planning to implement NVMe flash in your architecture, Ceph is not yet equipped to realize the optimized performance benefits of this media. For a more extensive explanation of Ceph Storage, read Ceph Storage [A Complete Explanation].
Real-world eCommerce use case
One of the largest eCommerce platforms in the Asia-Pacific region has revolutionized its IT infrastructure with Lightbits. Faced with the challenge of modernizing its operations, the organization sought to move from JBOD and JBOF designs to a disaggregated, software-defined solution. Lightbits, utilizing NVMe/TCP, emerged as the ideal choice, delivering high performance, low latency, and scalability. The implementation has significantly enhanced performance and data replication. Lightbits not only ensures Kubernetes portability but also offers rich data services, thin provisioning, and compression, optimizing storage efficiency. The platform’s flexibility, scalability, efficiency, and agility contribute to seamless operations and uphold the eCommerce giant’s position in the market.
Additional business and technical benefits realized by this eCommerce company:
- Cost optimization and savings. Lightbits software runs on any cloud or hardware configuration enabling the most cost-efficient configurations. That coupled with the simplified provisioning, management, and NVMe/TCP architecture results in lower TCO.
- Flexibility. The system runs on any cloud or hardware configuration enabling the most cost-efficient configurations.
- Scalability. The ability to scale up and scale out
- Efficiency. The system is easy to use with fully automated provisioning.
- Agility. To move, shift, and allocate storage on an as-needed basis and lift and shift workloads to any cloud.
To read the full case study, Lightbits Powers One of the Worlds Largest eCommerce Platforms.
Future trends in data center technology for retail
As online retail continues its rapid evolution, emerging IT infrastructure trends are reshaping the landscape, with storage technology playing a pivotal role. The increasing adoption of SDS solutions offers flexibility and scalability to accommodate the dynamic nature of eCommerce operations. The demand for high-performance, low-latency storage solutions is driving the integration of NVMe technology, providing faster data access and improving overall system responsiveness.
IT infrastructure for online retail is evolving rapidly, and leveraging NVMe/TCP Lightbits offers a solution that combines high performance, low latency, and scalability. As eCommerce businesses grapple with the challenges of managing vast amounts of data, transactions, and user information, Lightbits’ high-performance, scalable, and efficient block storage stands out for its ability to seamlessly integrate with many orchestration environments, such as Kubernetes, VMware, and OpenStack, as well as simplify operations.
The future of online retail is likely Adaptive Retail. Adaptive retail refers to a dynamic and responsive approach in the retail industry that leverages data, technology, and customer insights to swiftly adjust strategies, services, and operations. Adaptive retail embraces flexibility in inventory management, personalized customer experiences, and seamless integration of online and offline channels, ensuring retailers can quickly adapt to changing conditions and deliver a tailored shopping experience. Hereto the storage platform to enable this level of IT infrastructure flexibility and adaptability should be highly considered by platform engineers. Read the blog, “Adaptive Retail is the Future. Adaptive Infrastructure is Today.” for more information on this topic.
Conclusion
In conclusion, eCommerce platforms demand a robust, high-performance IT infrastructure, and platform engineers should pay particular attention to the underlying storage technology to ensure a successful endeavor. The real-world use case of Lightbits transforming one of Asia’s largest eCommerce platforms illustrates the efficiency, scalability, and agility achievable with modern storage solutions. As future trends in eCommerce emphasize adaptability and responsiveness, Lightbits Labs’ NVMe/TCP storage emerges as a crucial component, providing high performance and low latency while seamlessly integrating with evolving orchestration environments. The future of online retail will undoubtedly incorporate AI and Adaptive Retail, and the role of a flexible and adaptable storage platform cannot be overstated in meeting the dynamic needs of these workloads.
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