Traffic-aware distribution of e-commerce services

e-Commerce services have become a promising and profitable application of the Internet. Nevertheless, the use of the Internet as the communication environment in this case is not without its problems. For an e-commerce site to be successful it has to reduce the negative effects of unreliable connections and high network latencies, among others. Such problems may compromise customer satisfaction and therefore the success of the virtual business. Techniques based on improving the quality of a centralized server do not provide a reliable solution, since the difficulties faced are inherent to the network infrastructure itself, not just the server. A better solution tends to be the distribution of the service over the network, placing servers in multiple locations closer to the final users. The existence of multiple servers tends to increase availability, and assuming the placement is well planned, it tends to reduce delays and traffic-related costs. In this paper we discuss the distribution of e-commerce services by introducing a traffic-aware cost model and evaluating it through an actual log from an e-tailer. The results show that the model allow system designers to investigate cost compromises and the impact of the application workload on the effectiveness of the distribution in terms of reducing traffic, and thus operational costs and user-perceived latency.