E-commerce extended platform

The lack of infrastructure performance for Web-based applications often translates into lost revenues and customers. While a classic Web site could survive with 95% availability, an e-commerce solution could hardly last with a few hours of downtime in a week. For e-commerce, like any other new technology, there comes a time when the infrastructure must achieve unprecedented levels of reliability, scalability and robustness. Since the platform determines these three attributes, in this paper we address the choices associated with e-commerce platforms