Is your website ready for traffic spike? Akshay Ranganath (akrangan@akamai.com), Enterprise Architect

Agenda Traffic Spike - impact on site and brand Plan with Akamai: Performance Downtime Traffic Trends in India Plan with Akamai: Caching Offload through Netstorage Failover Custom solution Shopper Prioritization Application Managing 3rd Parties Q&A

Why performance matters? Source: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ Source for Traffic stats: http://blog.catchpoint.com/2013/11/29/black-friday-cyber-monday-2013-the-results-are-in/

Why downtime matters as well? Source: http://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2011/wwcampaign/inflexion/sept/im/overview.html http://dyn.com/infographic-how-downtime-financially-impacts-top-ecommerce-websites/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/the-downtime-survival-guide/?wide=1 Case study Target experienced multiple outages in late 2011 after launching its redesigned ecommerce site in August of that year. The first crash, which occurred mid‐September, was related to a huge surge in traffic when Target introduced the Missoni for Target apparel line. There were at least two outages during last year’s holiday season.. According to Rigor, one of the crashes lasted for about two and a half hours. The company used its Uptime Percentage Calculator (located on the Rigor homepage) to estimate how much that outage cost, which took into account how much the Target ecommerce division nets (according to Internet Retailer, Target’s’ online sales were $1,460,154,982 in 2011, which in turn equates to about $4 million per day.) Thus, Rigor estimated that 2.5 hours of downtime cost Target about $464,000. (Source: http://blog.smartbear.com/post/11-12-19/the-biggest-web-outages-of-2011/)

Trends: Online Traffic in India Travel: 35 million to 70 million by 2015 Retail: 51 million to 100 million by 2015 Travel and Retail each with a potential of $10 billion by 2015 Source: McKinsey, comScore & Assocham study Online shopping ~ 250% during this festive season at various metros. Traffic spike during the week of 2 October onwards right through till Diwali. http://www.assocham.org/Farb/Fgeneral/FComscore_/520ASSOCHAM-report-state-of-ecommerce-in-india.pdf&ei=HMWBUt6_C8GKrQfLzoHYAw&usg=AFQjCNEwJRKILMMtG8hUoF_6A3yoo3sDkA&bvm=bv.56146854,d.bmk Online shopping is likely to grow by nearly 250 per cent during this festive season at various metros. http://www.assocham.org/prels/shownews.php?id=4234 There has been a spike during the festive season, especially the week of 2 October onwards right through till Diwali, keeping in line with the festive and shopping mood of consumers. Amit Agarwal, vice-president and country manager of Amazon India Source: http://www.livemint.com/Industry/Rhh46pXajzq9n8PmOzsOWI/Online-shopping-spikes-this-festive-season-on-Diwali-deals.html How big is the opportunity? 330 million to 370 million Internet users in 2015 2.8% GDP to 3.3% in 2015 => $30 billion to $100 billion Focus on mobile - expansion expected here 3 biggest areas: Travel ($10 billion by 2015) Consumer electronics & Apparel (combined about $10 billion by 2015) Source: http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey%20Offices/India/PDFs/Online_and_Upcoming_The_internets_impact_on_India.ashx -- what will be the traffic growth? What is the type of numbers we are looking at? Traffic Trends Jul 2012: 61 million users growing at 41% annually Jul 2013: 86.01 million Jul 2014: 121.27 million Jul 2015 ~ 171 million Travel - penetration is 41% ~ 35.26 million to 70.11 million users in 2015 Retail ~ 60% ~ 51.6 million to 100 million users in 2015

What causes poor performance? http://www.yottaa.com/blog/bid/215408/The-7-Deadly-Mistakes-That-Make-Websites-Slow-Infographic

How can we help? Caching Offload Alerting & Monitoring Fail gracefully Let Akamai serve most commonly accessed resources Free up your origin to do the revenue / processor intensive tasks Offload Move marketing collateral and static objects to Akamai Alerting & Monitoring See what’s happening in real time Monitor for warnings and hints on data center overload Fail gracefully Avoid bad publicity Avoid losing revenue due to lost customers Cut the flab 3rd parties can be drag - so optimize / reduce them ! Source: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/shopping-cart-abandonment/?wide=1

Caching Honor cache control headers from origin Carefully set cache-control expires headers at origin Akamai will honor the setting Akamaishirtshop.com

Caching (continued) Design URLs for cacheability URLs should indicate a pattern for caching Not very helpful! Category page: http://akamai-t-shirts.com/clothing-accessories-men/t/11004 PDP Page: http://akamai-t-shirts.com/nostra-crew-neck-purple-t- shirt/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

Caching (continued) Segregate content for generic and specific users User type identified by cookie Rules on Akamai to cache for generic users; bypass cache for others. e.g.: logged in users users with items in cart Separate personalized content from base page Use Ajax for personalized content Or use Edge Site Includes

Caching - case study Prune query strings from cache key: jsessionid path parameter is useless in most cases removing this provided an offload close to 100% for home pages

Alerting & Monitoring Set alerts on the portal Alerts will warn you of impending issues like origin failure, high traffic or some untoward occurrence Create a team mailing list instead of individuals This ensures there is no single point of failure

Failover 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? Some best practices: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance

Case-Study - Failover Failover is about planning for outage You can leverage Akamai to : route errors to a different data center show a static page from Netstorage

Customized Solutions - SPA Shopper Prioritization Application 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 Winners and Losers of Black Friday’s megadeals http://www.cnbc.com/id/101235563 Wal-Mart—The world's largest retailer announced on Friday that it logged more than 10 million transactions between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, when its in-store Black Friday sales kicked off. Online, its one-hour guarantee items saw so much traffic that it needed to create a virtual waiting room for shoppers.

Other things to remember 3rd parties can cause a drag. “one tag to rule them all!” http://www.aaronpeters.nl/blog/google-plus1-button-performance-review Akamai study: http://www.slideshare.net/guypod/third-party-performance Optimize your assets Google pagespeed, Strangeloop Yotta best practices http://www.yottaa.com/blog/bid/296075/Infographic-The-Ultimate-Checklist-for-Optimizing-Web- Performance Akamai Aqua ION And finally, consider: 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? 3rd party tag management solutions: Brighttag (http://www.brighttag.com) Popular load testing tools: Keynote, Gomez, Skava

Questions?

Notes Akamai ecommerce blog: https://blogs.akamai.com/commerce/ Twitter feed: #AkamaiHoliday