Sales of highly sought-after products have taken off for many high-demand consumer items, including streetwear, fashion, and collectibles. When the hype experience is problem free, it’s great for brands – however, the flip side of fans and bots all going online at once is the challenge of creating a seamless customer experience - rather than a frustrating one. This is where EQL comes into its own as a pure-play, fit-for-purpose solution for hype launches. EQL provides the platforms and tools to manage hype commerce.
Unlike EQL, most general ecommerce tools and platforms have not been designed to efficiently deal with intense bursts of scale. EQL is purpose-built to scale for hype traffic without site crashes, payment chaos, or scammers and bots clearing out stock.
Cloudentity provides a critical backbone component within EQL’s technology stack. We enhance user registration and authentication services on EQL’s platform, allowing it to absorb massive spike shocks, while providing a seamless and secure user journey.
A good analogy would be a security guard only letting legitimate ticket holders through a chaotic entry point to an in-person concert. No matter what, it will take some time to get all the ticket holders through the gate, but the more gates you can open and staff, the faster you can get everyone in. Now take this online, where major brands can attract thousands, or even tens of thousands, of buyers per second, and consider the difficulties getting all users to a successfully completed transaction!
Cloudentity provides some intelligent engineering optimizations and tricks to ensure user experience is never degraded, including:
- Automatically scaling the required resources based on the load and delay of processing user registrations
- Placing users in virtual queues, rather than trying to register all of them simultaneously and potentially overwhelming the system
- Implementing virtual caches and queues to handle registrations in memory batches to optimize database communications and eliminate latencies
- Immediate acknowledgements and “near-cache” availability of data strategies to ensure registered users can immediately authenticate, even if the memory batch they’re in hasn’t hit the database yet
- And most importantly building-in back pressure mechanisms, rate limiting and throttling to ensure the system can work at optimal efficiency even under extreme load
Handling user registration peaks in a cost-efficient way requires a combination of proactive planning and quick, automated actions for recovery and system stability for overloads. Cloudentity provides a purpose-built CIAM solution that sits on top of EQL’s state-of-the-art clustering technologies for high performance and hyper-scale use cases.
We look forward to continuing to help EQL push forward its mission of enabling retailers to harness the energy of these launches and make the experience so much better for their customers.