Though e-commerce is enjoying healthy growth in SA, organisations should always consider how servers will cope with the inevitable increase in traffic when infrastructure is pushed to its limits, says senior engineer at F5 Networks, Martin Walshaw.
Research from World Wide Worx shows that e-commerce is growing at around 30% a year in SA, and that total spend on goods, services and Internet infrastructure is R59 billion.
Walshaw cautions that although this good news, when infrastructure is pushed over its capacity, the outcome can be frustrating for all involved and the simple answer of buying more or better infrastructure isn't always suitable.
"Who can forget when music fans flocked to a ticketing site in their thousands to secure spots at concerts and where left feeling frustrated?" asks Walshaw. "At one stage, more than 20 000 fans were waiting in a virtual queue to buy tickets, placing immense strain on the system and causing it to crash. The public vented their frustration on social media - the potential for reputational damage was great."
Traffic spikes are usually rare and don't justify the cost of additional hardware that would not be used after the traffic spike recedes, observes Walshaw, adding that this is where cloud bursting comes in.
"During peak periods, an application that is running in a corporate data centre or in a private cloud can 'burst' into a public cloud, providing the extra capacity needed to keep services running smoothly," he says. "It also means the company will only pay for extra capacity when it is used for keeping costs down. By being prepared with a cloud bursting strategy, there won't be any risk when there is a spike in demand; business can carry on as normal."
In turn, he believes that this will have a positive impact on business, as it avoids revenue loss due to applications crashing, while consumers have a more user-friendly experience, building trust in the brand.
"Cloud bursting abstracts the application delivery requirements from the underlying infrastructure. This enables the applications to span physical and virtual infrastructure in the data centre and the cloud, as demand dictates."
Walshaw states further that increasing an application's available resources by dynamically redirecting workloads as needed results in a more stable and reliable service for end-users, benefiting all parties.
"Good cloud-bursting technology can also eliminate network bottlenecks, by using metrics of real-time service behaviour to deliver demand-based workflow routing. Doing this over public and private data centres eliminates the restrictions of physical device, connectivity and capacity experienced within data centre silos."
Cloud bursting is today's obvious answer for achieving incremental capacity only when it's needed, according to Walshaw, adding further that the limits of servers and networks can be pushed safely with integration between the management tools and connectivity of public and private environments, creating a seamless experience across the two, and delivering a transparent extension of the data centre environment that avoids resource and management silos.
For anyone who might anticipate spikes in activity online or within their network this year, he advises that cloud bursting should be front of mind as a cost-effective, efficient and reliable solution.
"Businesses must stay on top of their online and network traffic in order to maintain and attract customers, and cloud bursting is an easy and affordable way to do that," he concludes.
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