As we look back at 2016 and the following stats, it is hard not to visualize the tremendous pressure presented to the online retailers and e-commerce vendors:
- eCommerce traffic to U.S.-based retailers on Black Friday (Nov 25, 2016) increased by 9%1
- Online shoppers spent $3.34 billion on Black Friday and $3.45 billion on Cyber Monday2
- U.S. shoppers spent 4.2% less in stores over the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend3
Network services, such as load balancers, occupy a strategic position in the path of application traffic and therefore, play a critical role in ensuring your website’s or mobile application’s availability and user experience.
With surges in online traffic that primarily occur during holidays, many retailers often overprovision their traditional, appliance-based load balancers. Software load balancers such as the Avi Vantage Platform are elastic and scale-out automatically to meet traffic needs. In fact, we wrote a blog series on ADC Mythbusters last year on why organizations do not need
- Specialized hardware to achieve terabit-class scale in minutes
- To overengineer to load balance their applications
- Weeks (or months) of time to scale out load balancers
- A separate APM solution to provide granular visibility into performance
As we march into with 2017, remember that it is still not too late for a New Year resolution. Let our resolution for 2017 be to proactively tackle the challenge presented by a spike in online holiday shoppers/traffic. Let our network admins and sysadmins have a pleasant holiday season as well!
Learn how Avi can help you stay prepared for peak online traffic to your website/application.
1 Montenegro, Maria. "2016 Holiday Retail Index by Verizon tracking digital commerce traffic." Verizon. N.p., 3 Jan. 2017. Web. 3 Jan. 2017. <http://www.verizon.com/about/news/2016-holiday-retail-index-verizon-tracking-digital-commerce-traffic>.
2 Lindner, Matt. "Cyber Monday ranks as the biggest online shopping day in the US." Internet Retailer. N.p., 29 Nov. 2016. Web. 03 Jan. 2017. <https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/11/29/cyber-monday-biggest-online-shopping-day-us>.
3 Lindner, Matt. “Shoppers shift to websites from stores during Thanksgiving weekend.” Internet Retailer, N.p., 30 Nov 2016. Web. 03 Jan 2017. <https://www.internetretailer.com/2016/11/30/shoppers-shift-stores-websites>.
