Scaling AWS for Black Friday: Best Practices

[rt_reading_time label=”Read Time:” postfix=”minutes” postfix_singular=”minute”]

With the holiday season approaching, online shopping is due to experience high volume traffic as events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are on schedule for their annual return. Black Friday raked up $6.22 billion in online sales in 2018, and with a sustained annual growth rate of between 20-25%, the 2019 holiday season is shaping up to be one of the biggest online shopping events yet.

While this may be an exciting time for shoppers, events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday can pose a challenging endeavor for eCommerce sites and online businesses, who need to ensure that their online infrastructures can scale and maintain strength under abnormally high traffic loads. Following problematic instances from earlier years, 2018 saw many large retailers face website crashes including high-profile retail brands with some having lost over $700,000 in sales per estimates by experts.

On the entertainment front, Avengers: Endgame broke box office records in ticket sales, crashing the websites of AMC Entertainment, the largest U.S. theatre chain, as well as Fandango, a popular ticket sales website. Despite the recurrence of such crashes, substantial growth in online sales makes it hard for companies and eCommerce platforms to accurately project and adequately prepare for these high traffic events. Furthermore, customer frustration that grows out of these crashes can have a drastic impact on long term sentiment, resulting in reduced sales and a potentially tarnished company image.

In light of these implications, it is important to start thinking about addressing your website or applications’ scalability and stability. In fact, scalability is one of the primary reasons businesses migrate their infrastructure to the cloud. AWS offers a highly supportive environment for such high traffic events, with a variety of tools and features that can ease efforts in this regard.

Onica has helped a broad set of customers move their infrastructures onto AWS for exactly these considerations. MovieTickets.com, a ticket supplier, moved their entire infrastructure on AWS to support the high scalability that would be needed during the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This allowed them to avoid crashes similar to the ones that Fandango and AMC Entertainment faced when Avengers: Endgame was released. Orange County Registrar of Voters also seeked Onica’s help in migrating their website to AWS so that they could support high traffic during election times.

5 AWS Auto Scaling Best Practices to Build Resiliency against high volume traffic

Migrating onto the cloud, although a great first step, is not the only measure required to ensure that a company’s website or application can survive unprecedented traffic surges. In addition to automating and scaling as much as possible, the following set of AWS auto scaling best practices can help companies maximize the robustness and preparedness of their infrastructures.

  1. Place checks and measures with Amazon CloudWatch. Monitoring the performance of critical assets during high traffic events such as Black Friday sales is very important. A workflow where the right people are alerted or appropriate actions triggered as soon as possible, through alarms and notifications set up for key performance metrics, can help you stay on top of issues if they arise.

  2. Use AWS Auto Scaling. It is good practice to place the most needed resources into Auto Scaling groups. These groups can help you treat multiple instances as a single object and scale specific instance types with specific resources together. AWS Auto Scaling also performs regular health checks on Amazon EC2 instances, replacing those that fail the check. These features, in addition to supporting PCI-compliant processing, storage and transmission of credit card data, make AWS Auto Scaling an effective tool to combat high-traffic load.

  3. Leverage Elastic Load Balancing. Distributing incoming application traffic across multiple instances in your AWS Auto Scaling group can ease traffic load. Elastic Load Balancing can help you achieve this automatically, in addition to balancing traffic across multiple Availability Zones.

  4. Amazon Route 53, typically used to route DNS queries to your load balancer, can also be configured for DNS failover. Amazon Route 53 will then check the health of registered Elastic Load Balancing endpoints to determine your application’s availability, and then route requests to the most available resource.

  5. Utilizing Amazon ElastiCache can help improve performance by storing information on fast, managed, in-memory stores to accelerate data retrieval when compared to slower disk-based databases. Additionally, it detects and replaces failed nodes and reduces the risk of overloaded databases to keep website and application load times speedy.

Ensuring all the above measures are in place is only one of the early stages in preparing for high-traffic events. Forecasting and building future-traffic models based on historical metrics, to estimate your future resource requirements, is a very important consideration in being prepared. This data can inform test scripts that test the robustness and scalability of your infrastructure. Coupling these tests with surprise drills for the team can help build preparedness and reveal potential areas of concern. AWS also allows vulnerability and penetration testing as long as it falls within the AWS Security Testing Terms and Conditions.

In the end, the goal of scaling for such high traffic events is to ensure that your customers have a great experience as they interact with your application or website. A slow or unavailable network can cost more than an immediate sale, as customer sentiment is affected in the long term. Hence, thinking about the needs and wants of your customers while fortifying your infrastructure can go a long way in ensuring your efforts are placed where they are needed most.

While these tools and best practices are designed to achieve the scalability and stability needs of high traffic periods, it is important to be prepared year round. Being aware of current environmental and economic factors, shopping traffic trends, and buyer behaviour throughout the year can help build a clearer picture of what you can expect when the shopping season commences.

Is your e-commerce site ready for the holiday season? Request a free consultation today!

Hidden layer

Share on linkedin
Share on twitter
Share on facebook
Share on email

Onica Insights

Stay up to date with the latest perspectives, tips, and news directly to your inbox.

Explore More Cloud Insights from Onica

Blogs

The latest perspectives on navigating an ever-changing cloud landscape

Case Studies

Explore how our customers are driving cloud innovation in their industries

Videos

Watch an on-demand library of cloud tutorials, tips and tricks

Publications

Learn how to succeed in the cloud with deep-dives into pressing cloud topics