Cloud Computing - Logistic Use Case for E-Commerce

Logistics is a dynamically expanding industry branch. This is related to highly growing e-commerce market segment, which is further influenced by progressing development in Internet technologies. The necessity of collecting and processing more and more data as well as the need for its analysis causes the advanced software techniques to be indispensable. The classical approach of IT industry to solving complex data processing problems relies on using powerful hardware resources vertical scalability. Such approach suffers limitations when data processing problems are complex enough. These limitations are related to infrastructure costs, system reliability and availability. Modern computer science addresses these limitations with different approach: to utilize multiple hardware resources units to solve complex problems. This led to applications which include Cloud Computing, Big Data and NoSQL. The foundations of such approach are briefly described and compared to the classical one. This paper analyses cases when classical, vertical-scalability based systems are good enough for the applications in e-commerce companies, as well as the cases when modern, horizontal-scalability based approach outperforms the former. Case study is presented and top-level architecture of IT system for an e-commerce enterprise is proposed and analyzed. It is found, that the main business factors that favor the cloud computing applications over the classical approach are: large scale of operations, large geographical coverage, including international and worldwide operations, strict requirements on delivery times, modern business models including consignment stores and delivery services outsourcing. The main benefits are improved scalability and system performance, total cost of ownership reduction and decreased entry barrier. The main challenge is to provide satisfactory guarantees of real-time data consistency in the distributed cloud environment, susceptible to network partitioning. It is expected, that in the long-term the e-commerce companies will increasingly migrate their IT infrastructure to Cloud Computing environments.