Evaluating Cloud Databases for ecommerce Applications What you need to grow your ecommerce business
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ecommerce is the future of not just retail but myriad industries from telecommunications to financial services. But constructing an ecommerce platform is challenging because of the high volume of data coming from different sources and geographically distributed customers. Enterprises are looking to leverage public cloud technology to meet customer needs. At the same time, enterprises also have a ton of rich customer data stored in their on-premises systems. How do you reconcile all the data and workloads across the silos that have built up over the years? The answer is to deploy an always-on, distributed cloud database designed for hybrid cloud that is both multi-model and can handle different workloads without compromising performance, scalability, or security. In this ebook, you ll discover why DataStax Enterprise is the one and only hybrid cloud database that is real time, secure, and able to support even the most complex and demanding workloads and ecommerce environments. 2
ECOMMERCE ACCELERATING YEAR AFTER YEAR Succeeding in ecommerce in the Right-Now Economy means a lot more than just providing a good online buying experience. It means re-jiggering your entire quote-to-cash process at the data layer to innovate by incorporating flexibility, adaptability, and scalability. To support ecommerce in the Right-Now Economy, you need to be able to innovate with your applications and do things like apply machine learning to customer searches based on contextual, real-time data. Today's ecommerce applications must: 1. Achieve real-time views across all customer interactions and touchpoints including both physical storefronts and mobile purchases. 2. Deliver an individualized experience to each customer corresponding to preferences, behaviors, and locations. 3. Drive customer loyalty and advocacy with highly responsive, reliable, and personally tailored responses to each customer interaction. 3
WHY HYBRID CLOUD IS A REQUIREMENT FOR ECOMMERCE An ecommerce system s architecture is multilayered by necessity. Logistics systems manage the movement of physical products. The ecommerce engine processes transactions. The online store is the interface for customers, and contains the cart and checkout mechanisms. Plus there are all the other systems for customer tracking, recommendations, support, and social communications that allow you to personalize the customer experience. Indeed, ecommerce requires you to automate your entire quote-to-cash process. That s a huge undertaking. Adding to the challenge, a growing number of applications in the ecommerce food chain are in the cloud while others remain on-premises namely, your legacy systems that you ve investigated significant capital in. So to make it all work together, fluidly and at scale, you need to be using hybrid cloud. By adopting hybrid cloud and by extension, a distributed environment you can access, process, and scale data between on-premises, cloud, and hybrid applications so that your ecommerce system gives your customers the responsive, personalized experience they demand. You also need data autonomy, or complete ownership and control of your data, which allows you to move it around as desired. After all, you can t afford to have your data locked into a particular application or cloud provider. Hybrid cloud gets you the best of all worlds: data autonomy, performance, availability, and elasticity when you need it. 4
HOW MULTI- MODEL DATABASES FIT THE BILL Most databases only support one or two data models. This model is what drives how data in that system can be organized, stored, and manipulated. It is generally very limiting. Multi-model databases, on the other hand, can support multiple data models against a single, integrated backend system. JSON, tabular, graph, and key-value models are all examples of what a multi-model database can support. As discussed previously, ecommerce systems are complex, containing everything from product catalogs, to customer data applications, to fraud detection systems, recommendation engines, shopping carts, and clickstream analyses. Each application has different data model requirements and, as we noted, some are located in the cloud, and some are on-premises. Face it: you re dealing with a new normal. You need your ecommerce database to be flexible enough to handle all the different types of data models that exist in your commerce system, no matter where they are located. You need a single multi-model database that spans across multiple data centers and/or cloud regions. 5
RESILIENCY AND SPEED AT SCALE WITH CARDS Today s ecommerce applications must be resilient. They must be fast. And they have to scale as required. That s why your ecommerce-supporting cloud database has to conform to the following CARDS application requirements. Contextual: Correlate customer transaction data across all the channels, storefronts, and ecommerce systems through which your business touches the customer. Always On: Get continuous access to all data with 100% uptime. Real Time: Process millions of transactions in real time. Distributed: Replicate data across multiple data centers or cloud regions. Scalable: Meet expanding business demands quickly and cost-effectively no matter how fast and how big the business grows. To achieve this, you need an ecommerce database that is masterless, or one in which all nodes are the same. In a masterless architecture, data is automatically distributed across all nodes in a database cluster. Advanced replication is also critical. This means that the database stores redundant copies of data across all participating nodes in a database cluster. Then, if any node in a cluster goes down, one or more copies of that node s data is available on other machines in the cluster. Replication can work across one data center or many data centers. All this adds up to linear scalability. This means that your ecommerce database should be able to add capacity simply by adding new online nodes. For example, if 5 nodes can handle 500,000 transactions per second, then 10 nodes can support 1 million transactions per second, and 15 nodes can support 1.5 million transactions per second. 6
NEEDED: A COMPREHENSIVE ENVIRONMENT You also need a comprehensive environment. Rather than having to deal with separate clusters for graph, search, and analytics, you want an ecommerce platform that is architected using a database that has real-time search, analytics, and graph all integrated in the same cluster. And on top of that, all of this has to be rock-solid secure, so you can keep your business and customer data protected. Look for an ecommerce environment that offers: External authentication via Kerberos and LDAP, the most trusted external security packages in use today, especially by governments and financial institutions. Transparent data encryption, which protects data at rest from theft and from unauthorized read access at the file system level. Data auditing, which enables administrators to create granular audit trails of some or all activity in a database cluster. 7
ANOTHER MUST: MIXED WORKLOADS Traditionally, each of the modules in an ecommerce system handled a different kind of workload: transactional, operational, or analytical, leaving businesses with siloed databases (or even whole data lakes) for each workload and making it impossible to get real-time insight into what was happening without moving data from system to system. These disparate technology stacks also compromised competitiveness by delivering delayed reports that resulted in insights too late for action. The solution? What Forrester Research calls translytical databases. (The word translytics is a combination of transaction and analysis.) According to Forrester, a translytical database is a single database that supports both transactions and analytics in real time without compromising integrity, performance, or your ability to scale. Translytical databases support many types of ecommerce use cases including providing real-time insights into what s selling as well as extreme transactional processing to handle even the most intense Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales volumes. You can store and process ecommerce customer data in a single integrated platform, enabling you to upsell and cross-sell new products based on customer likes, dislikes, buying patterns, friends, and historical orders. A translytical database s sweet spot is its ability to perform all these complex ecommerce workloads within a single database. 8
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS Your core business is selling products. Not IT. And certainly not constantly managing the operational aspect of distributed database clusters at the expense of innovation. Why not take advantage of pre-built services in the cloud to create an ecommerce solution that enhances your sales performance and leaves the infrastructure management to your cloud provider? A cloud-based managed service takes the burden of running your database clusters off your shoulders. And you want a managed service that goes beyond simple administration and oversight of day-to-day operations. It should include up-front proactive expert help in areas such as data modeling, tuning for your ecommerce applications, and more, to enable real hybrid cloud deployments. 9
DATASTAX ENTERPRISE DOES IT ALL ecommerce is rapidly accelerating. An increasing proportion of all retail sales year after year, ecommerce is at the top of all retailers minds. To compete effectively, your ecommerce database: Must use hybrid cloud Must support data autonomy Must be multimodel Must run in a secure and comprehensive environment that supports graph, search, and analytics Must be translytical DataStax Enterprise (DSE) checks all of these boxes. built on the best distribution of Apache Cassandra TM, DSE is the always-on, distributed cloud database purpose-built for hybrid cloud. DSE gives you a secure database that remains operationally simple whether scaled in a single data center or across multiple data centers. It fulfills all the requirements for an ecommerce platform, and also and also gives you the option to cede the challenges of operating a distributed cloud database to cloud database experts via DataStax Managed Cloud. For more information, click here. 10