A Cloud Architect’s Guide to E-Commerce Data Storage
E-commerce has transformed the way the world shops, and the convenience of online shopping has created immense opportunities for retailers. However, this growth makes it difficult to manage the vast amounts of data required to provide real-time insights and superior customer experiences.
For architects of e-commerce platforms, architecting the data platform for performance, efficiency, flexibility and reliability is paramount. Your data platform is not just a functional necessity but a strategic asset that can drive business growth and scale.
Why Data Storage Can Make or Break Your Business
Effective data storage solutions play a big role in enabling real-time analytics, transactional workloads and AI/machine learning (ML) workloads that empower your business to monetize its data, transform operations and deliver superior customer digital experiences.
Latency, measured in microseconds, is the enemy of e-commerce storage systems, as slow-performing systems can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost transactions and abandoned shopping carts. Your data platform must be reliable and highly performant even during fluctuating demand; events like Black Friday or unexpected social media trends can put a heavy load on your systems. Infrastructure that supports real-time data processing can be the deciding factor in staying competitive.
These challenges necessitate a modern approach to storage — one that is software-defined, scalable and cloud-ready. Modern cloud architecture has strong appeal among e-commerce leaders — especially those that have grown quickly and now have massive data environments that their legacy storage architectures, such as storage area networks (SAN) and direct-attached storage (DAS), struggle to support. It’s also popular among those organizations looking to drive cost efficiencies by building their platform on the cloud.
Foundational elements of a modern e-commerce infrastructure consist of software-defined storage often combined with open-source environments like OpenStack, OpenShift, KVM and Kubernetes. The challenge for platform architects, whether building their e-commerce storage platform on premises or in the cloud, is to achieve scale and flexibility without compromising application and site performance. Many legacy storage systems, especially those architected for spinning disks, have performance limitations, resulting in data silos and expensive and time-consuming scaling strategies.
4 Storage Strategies for E-Commerce Platform Architects
Do you face traffic spikes or unpredictable surges triggered by unforeseen events or viral trends? Do you need to harness data effectively to swiftly grasp market trends and customer behaviors to adapt promptly and deliver tailored products and experiences?
Here are four e-commerce business storage strategies that stand out as foundational elements for success.
1. Auto-Scale Services in Response to Demand
Cloud storage for e-commerce must be equipped to scale dynamically during unpredictable, peak demand periods to ensure superior digital customer experiences every time. Legacy storage architectures may not be built with “scale-out” principles. The result can either be lengthy and costly controller upgrades to meet changing requirements, which may involve downtime, or massive overprovisioning to provide longevity or account for demand spikes. Although some online retailers have deployed DAS or “just a bunch of flash” (JBOF) to cost-effectively boost performance at scale, this becomes problematic in terms of resiliency and efficiency.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is a game-changer for solving scaling limitations. SDS decouples storage management from physical hardware. This disaggregation provides flexibility and agility, enabling dynamic scaling in any direction, up or out.
Solutions like SDS allow dynamic scaling, so you can adjust your storage needs in real time. This flexibility ensures that application and site performance remain consistent, regardless of fluctuations in user demand. Effective data management is critical for ensuring seamless operations, especially in a sector where customer demands and market conditions can shift rapidly.
2. Modernize Your Cloud E-Commerce Platform for Efficiency
The cyclical nature of retail, coupled with sudden surges during promotional events or viral trends, makes capacity planning difficult for e-commerce platform engineers. Overprovisioning storage resources to handle peak loads can lead to unnecessary costs while underprovisioning risks performance bottlenecks. In addition, diverse data types require a storage system that can unify and process data effectively. Legacy systems often require significant manual intervention for provisioning, scaling and maintenance, which slows the ability to respond to business needs. Balancing performance, reliability and scalability with budget constraints is a constant challenge.
SDS empowers e-commerce architects to build data platforms that are not only efficient but also future-proof. Because SDS is disaggregated, it eliminates the need for overprovisioning to handle demand spikes cost-effectively and efficiently. Storage can be provisioned where and when needed, and built-in automation and data services reduce manual intervention. It can run on commodity hardware, which also significantly lowers storage costs.
E-commerce businesses that build on native cloud platforms and operate on a pay-as-you-go model may see the greatest cost-efficiency benefits. SDS supports hybrid and multicloud environments for seamless integration with existing systems and cloud services like AWS and Azure. Building on cloud native infrastructure enables online retailers to optimize their operational budgets and avoid buying expensive on-premises infrastructure. Another alternative is to architect a hybrid cloud model, bursting to the cloud for on-demand capacity or performance. This approach helps online retailers remain agile and ready to meet customer demands without the limitations imposed by traditional storage systems.
3. Ensure 24/7/365 Site Availability and Reliability
Site availability and reliability are top priorities for any e-commerce business. E-commerce platform engineers face immense pressure to maintain constant site availability and reliability. Unplanned outages, downtime or performance degradation directly impact revenue and customer trust. Architecting a system where the data is available to the applications where and when needed is necessary to ensure seamless user experiences and business continuity. Legacy systems can introduce risks, including unplanned outages, supply chain disruptions when provisioning hardware and components, and slow recovery from disasters.
SDS can directly address these risks. Supply chain issues are mitigated because the software can run on any commodity hardware or cloud. Its ability to integrate with hybrid cloud and multicloud environments enables quick failover to alternate sites, reducing downtime in disaster scenarios. A persistent storage system can result in more uptime. Built-in resiliency, such as synchronous replication and snapshots, helps ensure high availability and data protection.
4. Accelerate Data Collection and Transactions
Fast data collection and transaction processing are vital for e-commerce platforms to ensure real-time analytics and seamless customer experiences. However, legacy storage systems often introduce latency, slowing data collection and transaction processing. Overprovisioning storage to reduce latency increases costs and complexity without fully addressing performance needs.
By delivering high throughput and IOPS, SDS accelerates analytics workloads, ensuring timely insights for better decision-making. Modern systems leverage an NVMe over TCP storage protocol to deliver ultra-low consistent latency at scale, enabling instant data collection and rapid transaction processing. While NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is relatively nascent in the data center, many leading e-commerce companies already leverage it for efficiency and performance advantages.
The Future of E-commerce Storage
As e-commerce workloads mature, the demands on infrastructure will only grow. AI-driven and cloud native applications, real-time analytics and increasing customer expectations necessitate storage solutions that are both powerful and adaptable. Software-defined storage offers e-commerce platform architects the tools they need to build resilient, scalable, efficient, flexible, high-performance systems.
Source: Modern Storage Architectures for E-commerce white paper, Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc., April 2024.
The core challenge for platform architects is that many legacy storage architectures were not built for the 21st-century world of lightning-fast, turn-on-a-dime e-commerce, where data needs to be used and analyzed in real time.
Data platform strategies that offer dynamic scaling, efficiency, site availability and reliability, and accelerated data pipelines can revolutionize your operations in the digital marketplace. By making an investment in a software-defined cloud storage e-commerce solution, you can achieve sustainable growth and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Embracing modern software-defined cloud architecture is no longer optional; it is necessary to thrive in today’s fast-paced online retail environment. As e-commerce grows, those prioritizing these strategies will be best positioned to succeed and lead.
If you want to learn more about strategic approaches to overcoming architectural challenges for e-commerce business storage, download our white paper How a Software-Defined Foundation Drives Success in the Era of AI and Real-time Data Analytics.
