LINX publishes its Windows Azure point-of-sale system

Editor's note: &http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37954.html ">nbsp; this blog from Linx company E-commerce project manager Fernando Chaves, Describes how the company uses Windows Azure to expand his linxweb point-of-sale system for his customers.

Linx is a 26-year-old ISV and an ERP technology leader in the Latin American retail market. We have over 7,500 customers and more than 60,000 point-of-sale (POS) system installations in Brazil, Latin America and Europe. Our company has more than 1,800 employees at its headquarters and divisions, and our network of partnerships extends across Brazil and abroad.

Linxweb is a White-label business-to-consumer e-business solution that our customers can use as a new POS system in their sales environment. It integrates with customers in non-cloud ERP environments and can be managed like a traditional POS system, while allowing specific customizations such as promotions.

Setup phase: Before Windows Azure

Before migrating to Windows Azure, Linxweb operations are running on traditional hosting provider virtual machines (VMs), although in theory this kind of deployment can be extended, but it is not so easy and rapid implementation, and we often need to expand, add new memory, Computing power or network bandwidth to virtual machines.

Linxweb maintains the original single tenant model where all customers have his or her own deployment and environment. Customizations are done directly on the customer's web content file, which can result in some security issues, quality control issues, and errors due to a custom setting that overly supports request generation.

Before Windows Azure migrates, the Web site responds to each processing task: Generate product thumbnail images, send e-mail, and communicate with third party systems. Each task is completed synchronously, affecting the performance and availability of the end user of the E-commerce site.

Migrate to Windows Azure

When we decided to migrate Linxweb to Windows Azure, we needed some refactoring to make it compatible with the Windows Azure Web role stateless and load balancer.

Since each Web request can be sent to any Web server instance, we need to materialize the session data. We chose Windows Azure SQL database as our session store.

We have to delete all files written on the local disk because local disk storage cannot be shared between server instances. In addition, the local disk is not durable and does not have a backup disk like a BLOB storage or SQL database. Local disks are designed for speed and caching purposes, not for permanent storage.