Using Commerce Server 10.1 on Amazon Web Services

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As part of Commerce Server 10.1, we announced support for running on both Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services. We wanted to follow that up and provide some additional insight into what customers can expect when running Commerce Server on AWS.

The Business Side of AWS

Amazon Web Services is, of course, now a supported operating environment. Any underlying on premise version of Windows that is supported by Commerce Server will also be supported in Amazon Web Services EC2 virtual machine instances for each respective Commerce Server release from 10.1 and above. Licensing works exactly the same way as it does on premise and the policies are exactly the same. The only difference is that you are substituting a physical server with an Amazon EC2 virtual machine.

Deployment Topology

For the sake of comparison, again we replicated our existing performance lab topologies as used on premise when release Commerce Server 10 in the performance lab. Hence, our EC2 setup was configured as follows:

  • M3 Double Extra Large Instance Types with 30GB RAM, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 Virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units Each), EBS Storage, and 64-bit Windows platform
  • 3 Presentation Machines
  • 3 Application Machines
  • 1 Database Machine

PCI compliance also works just as with the on premise product. Hence, the same guidelines for hardening, best practices, and ultimate review and certification of the end solution apply.

Performance Results vs. On-Premise

In general, we found that AWS was about the same or better than our on premise performance lab in all three tests:

· Pages/Second

· Page Time

· Checkouts/Second

These are reflected by the following charts, respectively:

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As we saw in our testing with Windows Azure, the only test that had any real variability was in Page Time. And again, we attribute this to random network latency. This time, we saw the variations in both the on premise test as well as the AWS test.

Wrap Up

The key take away is that AWS and Commerce Server get along great – and that one can confidently deploy Commerce Server workloads in Amazon’s cloud and be assured of performance.

Stay tuned for further details including an update of our core performance guide coupled with more insight on how to choose the best AWS instance size for running Commerce Server.

Hope this helps!