Is your website ready for traffic spike?
Akshay Ranganath (akrangan@akamai.com), Enterprise Architect
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Agenda
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Traffic Spike - impact on site and brand
Performance
Downtime
Traffic Trends in India
Plan with Akamai:
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Custom solution
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Caching
Offload through Netstorage
Failover
Shopper Prioritization Application
Managing 3rd Parties
Q&A
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Why performance matters?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Why downtime matters as well?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Trends: Online Traffic in India
Travel: 35 million to 70 million by 2015
Retail: 51 million to 100 million by 2015
Online shopping ~ 250% during this
festive season at various metros.
Travel and Retail each with a potential of
$10 billion by 2015
Traffic spike during the week of 2
October onwards right through till Diwali.
Source: McKinsey, comScore & Assocham study
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
What causes poor performance?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
How can we help?
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Caching
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Offload
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See what’s happening in real time
Monitor for warnings and hints on data center overload
Fail gracefully
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Move marketing collateral and static objects to Akamai
Alerting & Monitoring
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Let Akamai serve most commonly accessed resources
Free up your origin to do the revenue / processor intensive tasks
Avoid bad publicity
Avoid losing revenue due to lost customers
Cut the flab
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3rd parties can be drag - so optimize / reduce them !
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Caching
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Honor cache control headers from origin
○ Carefully set cache-control expires headers at origin
○ Akamai will honor the setting
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Caching (continued)
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Design URLs for cacheability
URLs should indicate a pattern for caching
● Not very helpful!
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Category page: http://akamai-t-shirts.com/clothing-accessories-men/t/11004
PDP Page: http://akamai-t-shirts.com/nostra-crew-neck-purple-tshirt/p/CACMI5HDFIGXSZKU
Helpful URLs for Akamai:
Category: http://www.akamaiflowershop.com/product/category/?path=24
PDP:
http://www.akamaiflowershop.com/product/product/?path=24&product_id=4
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Caching (continued)
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Segregate content for generic and specific users
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User type identified by cookie
Rules on Akamai to cache for generic users; bypass cache for others. e.g.:
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logged in users
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users with items in cart
Separate personalized content from base page
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Use Ajax for personalized content
Or use Edge Site Includes
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Caching - case study
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Prune query strings from cache key:
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jsessionid path parameter is useless in most cases
removing this provided an offload close to 100% for home pages
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Alerting & Monitoring
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Set alerts on the portal
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Alerts will warn you of impending issues like origin failure, high traffic or some
untoward occurrence
Create a team mailing list instead of individuals
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This ensures there is no single point of failure
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Failover
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Origin failure is not an IF but WHEN!
Failure can occur due to:
○ Traffic spike / Attacks
○ Bot activity
○ Server Patch
○ Electricity outage, Cable cut
During the outage, would you prefer to see:
○ This page
○ Or this one?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Case-Study - Failover
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Failover is about planning for outage
You can leverage Akamai to :
■ route errors to a different data center
■ show a static page from Netstorage
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Customized Solutions - SPA
Shopper Prioritization Application
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ensure QoS for valuable customers by protecting a customer's origin web
infrastructure from being overloaded by flash crowds that exceed capacity
throttles origin traffic and gradually allows users as origin capacity increases
throttled users are kept in a waiting room, which is a configurable area with
having any type of branded message
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Other things to remember
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3rd parties can cause a drag.
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“one tag to rule them all!”
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http://www.aaronpeters.nl/blog/google-plus1-button-performance-review
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Akamai study:
Optimize your assets
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Google pagespeed, Strangeloop
Yotta best practices
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http://www.slideshare.net/guypod/third-party-performance
http://www.yottaa.com/blog/bid/296075/Infographic-The-Ultimate-Checklist-for-Optimizing-WebPerformance
Akamai Aqua ION
And finally, consider:
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Testing: Have you actually load tested your site for stability under planned
load?
Security: What if there is an attack on the most important day of your
campaign?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Questions?
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM
Notes
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Akamai ecommerce blog:
https://blogs.akamai.com/commerce/
Twitter feed: #AkamaiHoliday
©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM