In the world of e-commerce, maintaining a scalable and high-performing online platform is crucial for success. Auto-scaling, a technology that dynamically adjusts server resources based on demand, plays a vital role in ensuring optimal performance during peak periods and minimizing costs during slower times. We offer invaluable expertise in navigating the complexities of hosting auto-scaling for Magento and Adobe Commerce websites. In this blog post, we will explore the significance of auto-scaling and how we can help businesses harness its power to achieve seamless scalability and exceptional performance.
What is Auto-Scaling?
Auto-scaling is a technique that allows e-commerce platforms to automatically adjust server resources such as CPU, memory, and storage based on real-time traffic and workload patterns. By dynamically allocating and releasing resources as needed, auto-scaling ensures that your online store can handle surges in traffic without compromising on performance or incurring unnecessary costs during quieter periods.
Why is it important?
Customer experience is paramount. Slow-loading pages or website crashes during peak periods can significantly impact user satisfaction and lead to lost sales opportunities. Auto-scaling addresses these challenges by intelligently managing server resources, ensuring that your website can handle spikes in traffic and deliver a smooth and uninterrupted browsing and shopping experience to your customers.
What is On Tap Cloud's approach?
Our On Tap Cloud service provides auto-scaling capabilities for Magento and Adobe Commerce websites. Apart from our very smallest server configurations, every On Tap Cloud solution comes with an integrated load balancer that inherently supports clustered web nodes.
Our centralised platform constantly monitors end-user experience and server resources across all of our clients' websites. When it notices a service degradation, our platform automatically provisions an additional web scaling node. It takes just a few minutes for new scaling nodes to start serving customers. It will create as many of these as it needs over time to cope with the changing conditions.
Typically, we provision a larger main node that is sized to serve all of the website traffic during normal traffic conditions. However, scaling nodes are typically smaller in order to keep incremental costs down and to provide only enough resources to cope with the dynamic current demand.
Our centralised platform also detects improving end-user experience and will destroy scaling nodes to reduce cost.
For some of our clients, the main node is enough to cope with all of the traffic virtually all of the time. However, having the peace of mind that additional nodes will come and go as required means that peaks experienced through unexpected media coverage or periodic promotions never become a problem that forces your website offload. Instead, it enables you to capitalise on the opportunity that it presents.
What technically is involved for a merchant?
As part of onboarding a new merchant onto On Tap Cloud, we ensure that there is a modern, compliant deployment system in place. If not, we provide one. This ensures that a website's deployed application code is structured in a way that our scaling provisioning system can access.
That's all there is to it. Our centralised platform handles everything else.
Handling pre-planned promotional events
If you are aware of upcoming events that will generate additional traffic that is likely to cause the main node to become overloaded, then scaling nodes can be pre-launched before an event and destroyed after it.
This eliminates the need to wait for additional nodes to spin into action - especially when every second counts. Furthermore, even during these periods, additional nodes will spin up if demand outstrips your original expectations.
Once the event window has finished, and assuming the end-user experience is normal, then the scaling nodes are removed as planned.
Pay only for what you need
Of course, auto-scaling does come at a cost. However, you only pay for the resources that you use on an hourly basis. Given that you should be making more sales during these busy periods, there should be cost justification there - especially when the alternative without auto-scaling is probable downtime and no revenue.
Conclusion
Auto-scaling is a vital component in building a scalable e-commerce business. On Tap's experience in the Magento, e-commerce marketplace positions us as your trusted partner in navigating the complexities of auto-scaling.
