Accelarating cloud based ECommerce Apps, now made easy?

If you are a web based business such as an e-retailer hosting your business with Amazon cloud infrastructure, you may be in for a pleasant surprise. Amazon has just announced in-memory caching feature on its cloud services which will enable transactions such as e-retailing to go faster.

ElastiCache, announced on Monday, is software for caching frequently accessed pieces of data 'in-memory' — or in RAM — within the cloud. This speeds response times when querying sprawling databases or running complex calculations, and so should help companies to increase the responsiveness of applications on their websites, according to Amazon.

"Caching has become a standard component in many applications to achieve a fast and predictable performance, but maintaining a collection of cache servers in a reliable and scalable manner is not a simple task," AWS's chief technology officer Werner Vogels wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Traditionally ecommerce or web apps have relied on caching in middleware technologies to achieve similar outcome but often this an expensive undertaking given depedency on expensive software licences and niche skills of finetuning middleware software. If its claims are true, Amazon will make this in-memory caching to boost apps response speed relatively easier to achive.

"Cloud like" infrastructures make sense for large retailers

The bigger the IT landscape the less attractive the business case for shift to cloud computing. Well, you end up with a very large private cloud as economy of scale wipes benefits of public cloud. The argument will probably hold true in large number of cases. Though i can imagine large airlines leveraging public cloud as most common airline processes are interlinked or are shared with a few other airlines. (oh that's Amadeues for you!) i was thinking about this in the context of large retailers. If you are a large retailer like Tesco surely it's scale, growth plans and operational justify your own infrastructure? I was also thinking of this in context of news that Tesco has signed a eight-year deal to use Microsoft products and services. I wondered how much of it would be cloud based and would Microsoft's latest cloud offerings be leveraged in this deal.

"Cloud like" characteristics will certainly be most desirable, no doubt. Any business operation will demand agile, flexible, less capital intensive investment in it's infrastructure. But i am wondering if commercial constructs of such deals can be made to mirror that of "cloud like" contract?

When it comes to E-Retailing is Small the new beautiful?

Just came across the news of BigCommerce raising $15 million and I was wondering when it comes to dynamic growth are retailers better off looking at "small is beautiful" business model?

Launched in 2009, BigCommerce provides a comprehensive SaaS for retailers and merchants to manage e-commerce online. BigCommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO. And the price for the software is affordable for small businesses, with basic plans starting at $25 per month. The company has $200 million in total transactions via its SaaS and is adding 1,000 clients per month. Sounds like a good growth pattern to me!

Amazon EC2 is clearly growing backing on the same trend. The business model is simple, attract small start ups, low capital investments, pay as you go, adopt social media friendly tools to expand the reach. The issues may arise when business hits medium size growth challenges. But till then, welcome to dynamic growth!