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2024-06-15Hünkar Döner

AWS for E-commerce Companies: High Traffic, Low Cost Strategies

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AWS for E-commerce Companies: High Traffic, Low Cost Strategies

The e-commerce sector is a world that is open every day of the year, where competition is measured in seconds, and there is no tolerance for downtime. Especially during campaign periods like "Black Friday", "Cyber Monday", or "New Year", traffic can increase 10-20 times compared to normal times. In traditional server structures (On-premise), huge hardware investments that will remain idle throughout the year are required to meet this traffic. AWS, on the other hand, offers e-commerce companies scalability and cost advantages simultaneously.

Here are the key strategies that high-traffic e-commerce sites should use on AWS:

1. Flexible Infrastructure with Auto Scaling

E-commerce traffic is fluctuating. It is busy during the day, decreases at night; explodes when you advertise, drops when the campaign ends. AWS Auto Scaling adapts perfectly to this fluctuation. When CPU usage or the number of incoming requests increases, the system automatically adds new servers (EC2). When traffic decreases, it shuts down these servers.

  • Benefit: You only use the resources you need. You can optimize costs by running with 100 servers on Black Friday night and scaling down to 10 servers according to normal traffic the next morning.

2. Fast Content Delivery with CloudFront (CDN)

Users abandon sites that load slowly. According to Amazon's research, even a 100-millisecond latency can lead to a 1% loss in sales. Amazon CloudFront caches product images, CSS, and JavaScript files on your site in hundreds of data centers (Edge Locations) worldwide. It serves content to a user in Istanbul from a server in Istanbul, and to a user in Berlin from Berlin. This both increases site speed and lightens the load on your main server.

3. Database Performance: Read Replicas and Caching

The biggest bottleneck in e-commerce sites is usually the database. Every product view, search, and cart action puts a load on the database.

  • Amazon RDS Read Replicas: Create read copies of your database. Direct read operations like product listing and searching to these copies. Let your main database (Master) handle only order creation (write) operations.
  • Amazon ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached): Keep frequently accessed data (categories, best sellers, user sessions) in memory (RAM). Respond in milliseconds from memory instead of going to the database.

4. Resilience and Disaster Recovery

A fire may break out in a data center or power may go out. Your e-commerce site should not be affected by this. By setting up your architecture in a Multi-AZ (Multiple Availability Zones) structure, ensure that your data and servers work redundantly in physically different locations. Even if one zone goes down, the other zone continues to handle traffic.

5. DDoS Protection: AWS Shield

E-commerce sites are frequent targets of cyber attacks. AWS Shield Standard is offered free of charge to all AWS customers and provides protection against common DDoS attacks. Shield Advanced can be considered for more advanced protection.

Implementing these strategies requires technical expertise. To prepare your e-commerce infrastructure for peak periods and avoid sales loss, you should work with an experienced AWS Consultancy partner and subject your infrastructure to "stress tests".