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Contents
Part One Infrastructure
5. Assess your infrastructure
8. Secure your environment
Holiday 2014
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Holiday 2014
Ecommerce Preparation
Holiday 2014
Ecommerce Preparation
Based on your assessment of current performance, add capacity to areas that need
it. If your budget is limited, prioritize the components which could have the greatest
impact on performance (like your database or network). CPU is often a bottleneck in
ecommerce environments, so pre-order larger CPUs and have them on hand should
you need them.
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Do a load test
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Plan for problems in the future by making sure you have a plan in
place to handle security issues like emergency patching or an
unexpected security vulnerability. Know which teams you will
need to assemble to resolve these types of issues quickly.
Limit access
Limit access to your environment to authorized personnel. Require your personnel to use
strong passwords and regularly review your access list. Complete an audit of users who
can access your environment prior to your busy season.
Vulnerability scanning is an important tool in your security toolbox. Running a scan can
help you identify known vulnerabilities in your environment before they impact your
busy season.
Penetration testing will look for active weaknesses in your application and
infrastructure. Executing a penetration test annually is an important component of your
security program.
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Tenzings DoS
Mitigation service
DoS Assure
provides 24x7
protection from a
wide number of
incursions
including CMP &
UDP floods, Port
Scans, SYN attack
and Distributed
Reflection DoS.
Service options
include proactive,
always-on
protection, hotstandby and ondemand emergency
services.
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Caching can save system resources by holding information in memory, but when
the cache has to be refreshed it draws on system resources to complete this
activity. During peak periods of demand increase the time between caches.
Review what is cached and what is not. Make sure frequently called items are
cached. Some ecommerce applications by default have caching turned off for
some of their database elements. Review these settings and adjust them
appropriately.
Type ahead search uses additional sessions and threads within your application.
Increasing the number of characters a shopper must type before a type ahead
search is initiated will give you added capacity.
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Giving shoppers the option to view all items in a category is available on many
ecommerce platforms, but if you have a large catalog loading these elements takes
time and resources. Review all the areas where the option to view all is available
and restrict the number of items that can be viewed when this option is selected.
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Application
Performance
Monitoring tools like
Tenzings Commerce
Performance Manager
can help you identify
problem areas during
your holiday planning.
This service can
automatically pinpoint
performance
bottlenecks in your
application code.
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Small changes to how the business or marketing teams manage their campaigns
can help to make the holiday season less stressful for all those involved.
Constantly evaluate
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Identify who can approve changes to a campaign strategy and how these
changes are communicated out to stakeholders.
Freeze
Once you have prepared your environment and planned your campaigns
STOP making changes. Freeze your environment and communicate
campaign dates to your vendors. Make sure you understand all your
vendors change policies and if they have a freeze which could impact
your planning.
Limit changes
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Segment your campaign into blocks. Rather than sending out one email to
1,000,000 users, consider breaking the campaign up into smaller groups. This
allows you to better control traffic spikes and will spread activity over multiple
hours as opposed to generating a rush of traffic in a matter of minutes.
The practice of staggering your campaigns extends the life of your capacity as
users are alerted to the sales over a longer period rather than a mad rush when the
sale starts. This strategy allows you to pause a campaign when a problem is
detected, limiting the impact the campaign has on your shopping experience.
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Make sure you do not introduce new discount structures during your peak
shopping season. If you have never used a first time purchaser discount, now is
not the time to use it. Use new discount structures during off-peak seasons as a
test before applying them during your peak shopping season.
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Avoid discount codes which can put unnecessary load on your database. Returning
to the first time purchaser example, this type of discount requires your application
to search your database to determine if the user is eligible to use it. The larger your
database the longer the search. This activity will put unnecessary load on the
database, impacting other shoppers using your site.
Keeping a library of your discount codes and their parameters helps with designing
your test plan for new codes and campaigns.
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Even with the best planning you can still run into problems.
A well placed campaign can generate higher than expected
traffic to your site. For example, last Christmas one of our
clients discounted a single item to $1.00. The result was a
940% increase in traffic to their site in a 10 minute period.
This was well over the 40% increase in traffic they had
predicted.
Make sure you look at your environment and identify the
areas at the greatest risk to have a problem and prioritize
planning around those areas.
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In our experience it is inevitable that something will go awry, but the most
successful teams are those who are prepared. On that note, make sure you develop
an emergency response plan. Develop, document, test and communicate your
plans to all stakeholders.
Creating plans for each of these areas will help you and your team be prepared:
Website overload
Service impacting incident or disaster event
Security or DoS attack
Work with your team and vendors to review possible scenarios and identify ones
which are most likely to occur or will have the biggest impact.
Each of these plans should include:
An internal team contact list that describes who to notify and when
A customer communication strategy
Vendor details like support contacts, escalation contacts, and support
agreements
Steps to execute the plan
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Communicate
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As mentioned
earlier Tenzing
has recently
introduced a fully
managed, cloudbased, multiendpoint load
testing service.
Tenzing Site
Tester simulates
peak load on your
website across a
range of
geographies,
device types and
networks. It
speeds root cause
analysis and
remediation by
pinpointing
performance
issues in real
time.
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So here you are, some thirty odd pages later. Hopefully you
now have a better idea of how to prepare for Holiday 2014.
Its no small feat, however we cannot stress enough that
careful planning and preparation is the best way to make
sure that your web store stays up and running this holiday
season.
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