Avoid Failures

Searching

We were dealing with a retailer’s primary online brand. It had a huge catalog, half a million SKUs in 100 different categories. For that brand, search wasn’t just helpful. It was necessary. A dozen search engines sitting behind a hardware load balancer handled holiday traffic. The application servers would connect to a virtual IP address instead of specific search engines (see Migratory Virtual IP Addresses, for more about load balancing and virtual IP addresses). The load balancer then distributed the application servers’ queries out to the search engines. The load balancer ...