In recent years, I’ve found that IT teams faced new challenges and concerns on how Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) or load-balancing technology can address evolving business and organisational demands, especially business growth.
Digital retail and e-commerce businesses are most impacted by load-balancing demands given the inherent nature of the industry. Owning a digital storefront would see sales and customer interaction all day long, 365 days a year. However, these interactions are neither constant nor consistent, further complicated by digital services needing zero downtime. Google’s research showed that more than half of the people surveyed would not wait more than three seconds for a mobile website to load. With retail revenue at its peak during retail events, a suboptimal load-balancing service for a retail business can result in revenue lost to other competitors.
U.K. online fashion and cosmetic retailer, ASOS, is an example of how a retailer used newer technologies to benefit its business. As a fully online retailer, any downtime or latency from the store can lead to lost sales and impact customer loyalty. To improve their services’ availability, ASOS re-engineered their online store to convert it from a single platform running in legacy data centres into a suite of interacting microservices deployed on Microsoft Azure Cloud. A key challenge was finding a cost-effective solution to accommodate significantly higher traffic numbers and transactions during holiday seasons and events. To resolve this, ASOS used our metered licensing model for their load-balancing needs.
Flexible consumption of technology such as metered licensing for app delivery can be a valuable tool for retail leaders. In ASOS’s example, metered licensing offered unlimited ADC instances while they were only charged for the applications’ traffic throughput. The flexibility and scalability allowed ASOS’s network fabric to fluctuate based on real-time traffic needs, and not be hampered by the number of licenses available. Thus, ASOS relied on a single license, yet enjoyed multiple load-balancers and an always-on application experience on a cloud environment.
Metered licensing helped ASOS support 167 million site visitors, handling up to 33 orders every second on a record-breaking Black Friday sale.
Technology challenges and business priorities in Asia Pacific
Technology leaders of global and local enterprises are considering how web and server applications can help their organizations drive growth. Research firm IDC polled over 500 APAC enterprises who identified data analytics, unstructured data, and public or multi-cloud adoption as the top few data management priorities in 2019.
While businesses in Asia Pacific increasingly recognize the value of digitalisation, it conflicts with strategic challenges that prioritize uptime and reliability. Gartner identified several technology trends that were requested by APAC customers, and we’ve also heard requests for digital replicas of physical assets and data, the need for an immersive user experience, and the need for augmented analytics to add further value to their operations.
Just like how metered licensing enables ASOS to fluctuate traffic, IT should have a flexible environment and capabilities in place, so they can seamlessly shift resources into new projects and new applications to meet market demand. Most of all, augmented analytics must be able to pre-empt issues and detect them early for business agility, all while ensuring that the retailer’s numerous apps and services are easy to manage. That’s because applications are no longer just an asset for the e-commerce or retail business; instead, they are the business itself. Having full visibility over the operation and how applications are behaving in real time is critical.
Maintaining business uptime with per-app load-balancing
A key IT challenge in businesses is the traditional, centralized approach with vendor lock-in for load-balancing. In most cases, centralized load-balancing sees only 3% utilization across the entire business’s applications during the whole year. Instead of centralizing IT resources, businesses could now instead get efficient utilization through a per-app approach.
A key benefit in metered licensing models lies in the availability of per-app load-balancing. With the license, APAC businesses can experience app-by-app deployment and management of data traffic, instead of relying on one load-balancer to handle all traffic for multiple apps. If the company is conducting routine maintenance on one application, the other apps do not experience downtime, since load-balancing is no longer centralized on a single ADC. The accessibility on unaffected applications remains, preventing companies from making business compromises in pursuit of digitalisation.
Retail businesses are now capable of rolling out new applications in an easy-to-manage, flexible way. Having different cloud environments is no longer a limitation when it comes to dealing with technical complexity and accommodating applications on different platforms. Now, IT can spin up new ADC instances in a matter of seconds, pre-configured and optimised to deliver applications in any cloud or on-premise environment. This gives retail businesses the peace of mind and frees up resources to form new teams and focus on enhancing the quality of interaction with their customers, partners and suppliers.