Accelerating e-commerce sites in the cloud

E-commerce web sites typically have large fluctuations in their IT resource usage, while rapid elasticity is an essential characteristic of cloud computing. These characteristics make the cloud a good fit for hosting e-commerce web sites. Cloud providers deploy their cloud in their data centers. However, cloud providers usually have a limited number of data center locations around the world. Thus, e-commerce web sites in the cloud may be far away from their customers. Long client-perceived response latency may cause e-commerce web sites to lose business. To solve this problem, we propose a virtual proxy solution to reduce the response latency of the e-commerce site in the cloud. In our approach, a virtual proxy platform is designed to cache applications and data of e-commerce sites. A k-means based table partitioning algorithm is designed to select frequently used data from the database in the cloud. We have used an industrial e-commerce benchmark TPC-W to evaluate the performance of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach can significantly reduce the client-perceived response time.