1. Is your website ready for traffic spike?
Akshay Ranganath Enterprise Architect

2. 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

3. Why performance matters?
Source:
Source for Traffic stats:

4. Why downtime matters as well?
Source:
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:

5. 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.
Online shopping is likely to grow by nearly 250 per cent during this festive season at various metros.
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:
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:
-- 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: million Jul 2014: million Jul 2015 ~ 171 million Travel - penetration is 41% ~ million to million users in 2015 Retail ~ 60% ~ 51.6 million to 100 million users in 2015

6. What causes poor performance?

7. 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:

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

9. Caching (continued) Design URLs for cacheability
URLs should indicate a pattern for caching
Not very helpful!
Category page:
PDP Page: shirt/p/CACMI5HDFIGXSZKU
Helpful URLs for Akamai:
Category:
PDP:

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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:

14. 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

15. 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
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.

16. Other things to remember
3rd parties can cause a drag.
“one tag to rule them all!”
Akamai study:
Optimize your assets
Google pagespeed, Strangeloop
Yotta best practices
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 (
Popular load testing tools: Keynote, Gomez, Skava

17. Questions?

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