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Chris Reddick (President and CEO of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity) talk about the most efficient ways to increase performance of an online auction site.

Part 3 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: The next big thing for me about B2B auction sites is performance, right? Because we've got clients—I remember a few years ago we had the City of San Antonio contact us and say, “We have 270 websites, and we need you guys to do a complete analysis of all of our security, all of our performance, and do a complete audit of where we are today on all 270 sites on every server.

But then we want you to put our five-year plan together for performance and security and patching of your eAuction software.” I remember it took us like four months. It was a 198-page paper that we put together, and it took us months to figure all that out. Right? So that's big and that's on an obviously huge scale. 

what is hipaa

RON: But these guys now, they're coming in and we're doing this big B2B auction site to potentially be huge and grow, and it might go from 10 auctions a day to 10,000 auctions a day. Performance could very rapidly become an issue, so we want to make sure when we install a new eCommerce auction site for a client that we're planning for performance. 

So why don't you dive in a little bit when we're talking about, the types of auctions, what is performance, and what the heck does that mean from both an application and a physical standpoint? Because I think it's almost the same thing, right? We have SOA architecture, service-oriented architecture, and that architecture has as much to do with performance as does the physical hardware itself, too, right? 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: That's right, that's exactly right. It really can be high level, broken into application and architecture of the application, application performance, caching, et cetera. And then the infrastructure and scaling out and setting up performant infrastructure. And I couldn't agree more. 

We've worked with so many clients who have major promotions. They'll do marketing campaigns. They may have a news release, a press release, some big advertisement, et cetera. And it works. And as long as we can collaborate and plan, we can set the infrastructure and the application up to be able to dynamically adapt to high-traffic scenarios.  

Many of our clients like to go with what's typically referred to as a monolithic—or a single instance of an—environment for their eCommerce platform, scale that up for specific needs, and then scale it back down whenever those needs are mitigated in the short term. So they may have a long-term growth trajectory, but spikes in traffic that are massive.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: We don't necessarily want to consume capital unnecessarily to deal with those spikes, so basically there are two big areas where we can attack this. One is with infrastructure. And without getting too much into detail and infrastructure, the bottom line with the infrastructure side is that the infrastructure itself can be scaled out, and we can set up because we're using a service-oriented architecture.

We basically have the ability to split the application out into respective components that can then live on physical infrastructure that can be scaled out independently. And that allows us to infinitely scale the entire application and the performance as needed based on increasing the infrastructure and based on the capabilities of virtualization and Cloud hosting and Cloud infrastructure. 

This is relatively simple and relatively low cost, in particular if it's for spurts where there are major spikes. So this is something we would recommend. Now, the really cool thing about this is we can set everything up so that it's a low-cost environment, but the environment can intelligently, dynamically grow and shrink on its own based on the traffic level. And we can set and configure variables that drive this decision making that the infrastructure uses to scale itself up and down.  

And the other piece is—and there's a lot there that we could unpack later—the application side of things. It's really powerful if the application side is service-oriented architecture and the ability to have noSQL and caching capabilities that are extremely robust. 

One of the most interesting things about most eAuction sites is, if you actually look at the data that gets transferred back and forth, most of it is duplicated and wasteful. So we're going to want to use caching mechanisms, like turning on a CDN. So the images and static files that don't change, they're not dynamic and they can get cached by a third-party provider like a CDN company, a content delivery network. This is a surface-area caching that will cache things like images and static files that support the site, like a logo or physical files that tell the site how to display.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Beyond that, there's also dynamic content caching that we can do, such that when someone makes a request to the site and they're asking for a list of bids based on this filter, et cetera, et cetera, we can then cache that request. And if anyone else within a certain time period makes the same request, we don't have to hit the infrastructure to ask for the calculations and the CPU and the RAM and the hard drives we use. We have that in a noSQL cache.  

You can just think of that like, “you just heard something from someone, and you remember it, and you don't need to go look it up.” It's the same thing for the application. The application has this ability to have a short-term memory, if you will, and this is really what the cache is. So we can configure this and optimize it and precede that cache so that when users are on the site, it's extremely performant and it also reduces your overhead for your infrastructure. 

So these two are tuned, as you grow your eAuction business, hand in hand. It can be somewhat expensive over time, to continue the performance tune the application side of things beyond a certain threshold, there's a law of diminishing returns there. So you want to essentially increase the infrastructure, where it takes a lot of effort to increase the performance of the application. And then once you get to a certain level of traffic and performance or need, then further optimize the application and just keep tweaking as you scale your business.  

So you really want to look for a partner who can help you with this so that you can get an immediate value for your eAuction platform, that doesn't require a lot of setup and sophisticated configuration, that just works and is performant. But it needs to be architected and designed and have a plan to be able to scale it up over the next three to five years. 

So that's what we look to do, Ron, whenever we're working with clients. And I know that this is always a challenge for clients, right? Because as they scale their business, we don't want them to be painted into a corner from a performance perspective. 

RON: Well, and we never know what scaling means [to them. Does it] mean they divest and sell off pieces of the business as they get wildly successful? When I was at tech company and we started being successful, it meant acquisitions. We acquired nine different companies over the course of just a few years, and we grew. 

When we left Novell, there were about 12 of us, and we grew it to almost 2000 employees. So I mean, what is scaling? Does scaling mean three guys in a garage start up an online auction site and it goes from 10 auctions a day to 10,000 auctions and it's still three guys. It's a tiny group, right? It's a small group of people, but the site itself is wildly successful. or it could be going worldwide with a global auction platform. You mentioned the CDN and caching the images, right? Does that mean we go globally and the infrastructure scales with B2B auctions?

Continue to Part 4 to discover how to increase customer self-service.

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