webinarseauctions-chapter-12-part-4-migrating-to-a-new-eauction-platform Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, discuss maximizing site performance on a new eAuction platform. Part 4 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 3) RON: Moving on to the next section, [let’s talk about] the extension of security. You almost always hear this, and even when I'm talking to our eAuction platform clients, I'm always talking about security and performance. That just seems to be the second half of security. The more security, the more data you have, the more taxing it is on the performance. From this perspective, I'd like to have you dive into: What does performance mean on your auction website? Go ahead and dive into the architecture and talk about the search index or separate databases, load balance, all the typical server hardening stuff that I see you and the infrastructure team specialize in. Then in the next half of this last section [we’ll talk] about the SEO, and that's my area of expertise. RON: But the performance is really you. So go ahead and dive into the performance. What does that mean when I say, “I really want my site's performance to be awesome?” CHRIS: It's a great question and a great topic. This is obviously key for online auctions, especially whenever we're operating at scale. And it has multiple facets. One of the key facets is, what's the architecture? A lot of systems can perform well under a relatively small load and small concurrent user base, but whenever they have a significant concurrent user base— many people using the system at the same time, and there are a lot of people using the system—how does it perform and how easy is it to scale up the resources without having to change big things that are hard to change like the software itself. This is something that we've constantly refined and constantly made a priority with all our projects. Fundamentally, one of the best ways to deal with performance is to look at what's needed when, and how can we answer the question: How can we optimize this so we're not doing data-intensive and CPU-intensive requests over and over? How can we not repeat the same thing over and over? So certain requests to the auction eCommerce platform site, to the application, can be very intensive, but they can often be duplicated thousands of times during a day or even within a minute. The same request is happening over and over and over on the server. What we want to do is take those duplicate requests and similar requests and cache them into a NoSQL database that's just a flat set of data that's easy to index. Usually, this is going to be Elasticsearch or Redis (RediSearch), and these are both great options for NoSQL. Depending on what part of the application we're looking at, we're going to leverage these tools. CHRIS: The other thing that we can do is, whenever we're interacting with the eAuction application and therefore making calls back to the server infrastructure that's hosting everything, we want to send data back and forth over the wire that’s as minimal as necessary. If we can keep that concise and complete, then we're going to end up in a situation where we're only sending what we have to. Anything that's a duplicate request is going to be cached very well. All of the requests that require that the server do some processing, we're going to make use of that that's a ten X or hundred X or a thousand X more than most sites would do. This is going to give us this exponential scaling capability. And then you also have the concept of architecting the application so we can function across multiple pieces of hosting infrastructure. We talked about caching the data, making calls back and forth between the application and the user interface. The other big piece is being able to scale the infrastructure without running into major technical issues. Whenever you're scaling your infrastructure, you have physical devices, and if it's a Cloud infrastructure for your eCommerce auction, you have physical sets of resource groups that are virtualized physical, but they’re independent sets of resource groups. This is representative of different physical server hardware that's in a large data center, and it could be in different regions of that hosting infrastructure. CHRIS: So think about it, you're sending live auction site data across these physical boundaries, and the application needs to be able to understand how to persist data and where, so that any interaction across different physical domains doesn't have data loss and doesn't have large latency or delays in loading. This is a lot of fun. I don't know if we're going to have the video of my face in this, but I'm getting excited talking about it! CHRIS: You really want to work with an eAuction platform vendor who loves these challenges, loves these opportunities to dig in and take it to the extreme, because that passion and love of making the application really perform, that's going to show through whenever you scale and you build it out. Look, most people aren't going to need to start out with a highly skilled application, but what will happen is, with your success, you will be presented with that requirement, and you don't want to be surprised down the road. Continue to Part 5 to find out how important SEO is in eAuctions.
Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, discuss maximizing site performance on a new eAuction platform. Part 4 of a 6-part series (Return to Part 3)