Avail is proud to announce that Avail SaaS has launched. Starting now Avail offers recommendations as a software as a service.
For those of you who are acquainted with the eMarketing Suite we have launched the functionalities of the Navigation Predictor and the Social Search Optimizer first. More modules will be added in the near future.
Recommendations are requested client-side on the browser using JavaScript in a solution similar to Google Analytics and other well known SaaS services. The recommendations are administrated using the Control Panel in the same manor as the local install version of the eMarketing Suite.
Check out the details at www.avail.net/saas
Avail SaaS is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for reliability and scalability. Hosting on Amazon offers the possibility to add a large set of machines to our cluster within minutes. Also, the solution is hosted at two physically separated data centers for reliability.
AWS is what is referred to as a Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developing on a PaaS is fantastic, especially if you have experience with setting up physical servers. No more power outages, maxed out power, cooling that stops working, redrawing of cables, following unlabeled cables and so on and so on. At first it was a bit of a threshold and there still are some challenges, but once past this the flexibility offered with a PaaS is fantastic. With PaaS hardware architecture becomes as easy to remodel as software architecture. Also, it affects software design as it adds a new axis of freedom - CPU. Before CPU was a fairly static maximum that was core in the design. Now with a PaaS one can start up 20 powerful machines for an hour to crunch some numbers and then shut them down. For example, an e-commerce site typically has a peak after lunch and after work, in between there is a lot of unused CPU. With a PaaS machines can be added to handle the peak loads and then scaled down to the number of machines that are appropriate for load. There have been services similar to AWS before, but nothing as easy and flexible as AWS. Noteworthy competitors to AWS are MS Azure and Google App Engine.