©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

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

©2013 AKAMAI | FASTER FORWARDTM

Agenda● Traffic Spike - impact on site and brand

● Performance● Downtime● Traffic Trends in India

● Plan with Akamai:○ Caching○ Offload through Netstorage○ Failover

● Custom solution○ Shopper Prioritization Application○ Managing 3rd Parties

● Q&A

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Why performance matters?

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Why downtime matters as well?

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Trends: Online Traffic in India

Online shopping ~ 250% during this festive season at various metros.

Traffic spike during the week of 2 October onwards right through till Diwali.

Travel: 35 million to 70 million by 2015Retail: 51 million to 100 million by 2015

Travel and Retail each with a potential of $10 billion by 2015

Source: McKinsey, comScore & Assocham study

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What causes poor performance?

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How can we help?● Caching

○ 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 !

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Caching● Honor cache control headers from origin

○ Carefully set cache-control expires headers at origin○ Akamai will honor the setting

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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Customized Solutions - SPAShopper 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

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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?

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Questions?

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Notes

● Akamai ecommerce blog: https://blogs.akamai.com/commerce/

● Twitter feed: #AkamaiHoliday