RightScale Case Studies

E-Commerce Site Woot Scales with RightScale and aiCache

Business Overview and Challenge

Woot.com is a well known online e-commerce site, famous for creating the "one day one item sale" business model. Woot.com's main website offers one discounted product each day, often a piece of computer hardware or an electronic gadget.

Periodically Woot.com announces a "Woot-Off", a short term frenzied mutation of the product posting procedure. In Woot-Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous deal.

As the news about Woot-offs goes viral in just few short minutes, traffic to Woot.com's website spikes to tens of thousands of connections a second. These orders-of-magnitude spikes can overwhelm Woot.com's datacenter.

Woot.com needed a solution to support their intense traffic spikes that would not require a massive investment in additional hardware, software and support.

Business Solution

Woot.com turned to the cloud because of the attractive pay-as-you-go, resources on-demand model. This model provided Woot.com a solution for handling massive traffic spikes without the up-front capital investment. Woot.com chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud as its base cloud infrastructure.

With less than a day's work total and using the RightScale management platform, we were able to configure aiCache for use during Woot-Offs. Our site stays up under the crush, and we've saved quite a bit on hardware purchases and time spent optimizing

Luke Duff,Retail Manager, Woot

Woot.com then evaluated and chose RightScale as a Cloud Management Platform to provide additional automation and scaling on the AWS cloud. RightScale provides what is needed to run a full customer-facing website on cloud infrastructures with scalability and reliability. Based on the rules set by Woot.com in the RightScale dashboard, the deployment can scale up as demand grows and scale down as demand decreases. Woot.com decides when and how fast to scale – two servers at a time or fifty.

To further complete the solution, Woot.com leveraged the RightScale ISV eco-system to find an ISV partner that could make the handling of traffic spikes more robust. The solution they chose was aiCache's Web Acceleration – deployed and managed through the RightScale platform. aiCache is a unique software product that increases the level of performance and availability of your website. aiCache off-loads request processing from the Web, Application and Database servers, reducing the required amount of servers, space, power, cooling and the complexity of code a site requires to sustain high volumes of traffic.

RightScale and aiCache deliver results for Woot.com

Using the Rightscale platform, Woot.com deployed instances on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and directed all web traffic to the aiCache accelerators.

With the flexible caching configuration of the aiCache software, Woot.com accomplished a caching ratio of 96%. This means that while thousands of requests a second are fulfilled by aiCache, barely any load trickles through to Woot.com's datacenter.

During their Woot-off traffic events, Woot.com harnesses the power of RightScale's monitoring, and now uses their load balancer to move all Woot-off traffic from their datacenter to the aiCache instances in the cloud. Once complete, they use the Rightscale dashboard to scale back the instances on Amazon EC2 to reduce costs.

"With less than a day's work total and using the RightScale management platform, we were able to configure aiCache for use during Woot- Offs. Our site stays up under the crush, and we've saved quite a bit on hardware purchases and time spent optimizing." said Luke Duff Retail manager at Woot.com.