Keywords

1 Introduction

Electronic commerce is playing a more and more important role in the international and national trade. Most of famous electronic commerce web sites have archived great success in the market such as the Ebay, Taobao, Dangdang and Alibaba so on. With the development of electronic commerce, PB-class structured semi-structured and non-structured data such as transaction data and picture files occur in these years. The traditional electronic commerce architecture is difficult to store and process massive data, make some analysis and do some data mining based on these massive data. In order to solve the challenges of electronic commerce applications, we must transplant the traditional electronic commerce applications into the cloud. In this chapter, we designed a cloud framework for electronic commerce applications.

The rest of this chapter is arranged as follows, we begin with background and related work in Sect. 2. Architecture of electronic commerce application in the cloud is proposed in Sect. 3. We give a detail analysis about semantic cloud file system in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5, we discussed the security of electronic commerce in the cloud. Finally, in Sect. 6, we discussed the future work and conclusions.

2 Related Work

Electronic commerce is playing a more and more important role all over the world. According to the report of electronic commerce research and development [1], the e-commerce transactions accounted for a total GDP of China in 2011 is 12.1%. And it will arrive at the 20% in the next 5 years. Now, more and more users have become the participants of electronic commerce. They buy and sell products from the EC web sites. The main electronic business models [2] have B2B, B2C, B2G and C2C. The most famous EC web sites have Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, Taobao, Jingdong and Dangdang so on. All these web sites will process millions of transactions data every day. Now, most of big electronic commerce companies are considering to deploy their EC web sites in the cloud. Cloud file systems and cloud databases are the most important technologies in the cloud. The most famous cloud file systems have Google’s GFS [3], Hadoop HDFS [4], KFS [5], Taobao FS [6], Facebook Haystack [7] and so on. The cloud file systems are used to store all kinds of non-structured data and the cloud databases are used to store the semi-structured data and structured data. The famous cloud databases have Google’s BigTable [8] and Hadoop’s HBase [9] so on. Security is the key factor in the cloud. How to ensure the electronic commerce security in the cloud environment? Lots of existing security technologies can be used such as the SSL protocol, SET protocol, VPN technologies, digital signature technologies, and all kinds of encryption algorithms.

3 Architecture of Electronic Commerce Application in the Cloud

Our framework includes eight parts, they are: (1) Storage cluster and computing cluster. Storage cluster is used to store PB-class electronic commerce web site’s files including non-structured files such as web pages, video and audio files etc. the computing cluster is used to execute the transaction tasks such as electronic commerce transaction data, query tasks, and so on. (2) Linux operation system. In order to transplant the traditional electronic commerce into the cloud, we need to use the Linux as the operation system. (3) Semantic cloud file system. In order to store and manage billions of small files better, we designed a semantic cloud file system framework. It will have good efficiency when processing massive small files. (4) HBase. It is an open source cloud database. We select it to store some pictures using the Key/Value model. At the same time, we can use it to store the billions of files’ metadata and their semantic index information. (5) HUABASE. It is a column-based relational database. In our framework, we select it to store all kinds of structured data, such as products’ data and transaction data. (6) Millions of ad hoc query plans. To all electronic commerce web sites, the big challenge is how to process millions of query plans, especially some complex query plans such as the Join operations. (7) Cloud security for the electronic commerce. We designed a cloud security framework for the electronic commerce based on the PKI. (8) Electronic commerce applications in the cloud. Figure 1 is our framework.

Fig. 1
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Architecture of electronic commerce application in the cloud

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4 Semantic Cloud File System for Electronic Commerce Applications

Figure 2 is the framework of semantic cloud file system.

Fig. 2
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Framework of semantic cloud file system

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We use the semantic cloud file system to store massive data in the electronic commerce. It have the following several characters: (1) Metadata cluster. GFS and HDFS have a name node and lots of data nodes. Unlike the GFS and HDFS, semantic cloud file system will have several name nodes and lots of data nodes. (2) Semantic cloud file system will consider the billions of small files. Unlike the Google search engine, the electronic commerce web sites have billions of small files. We need to improve the processing efficiency of billions of small files. However, the GFS and HDFS can’t process the small files well. They split all big files (GB-class or TB-class) into 64M’s files blocks. And all these blocks will be copied three replicas and be stored into different racks. (3) Semantic file system will consider integrating non-streaming data access and streaming data access methods together. (4) Semantic file system will use the common hardware, too. Like the HDFS and GFS, the semantic cloud file system will run on top of common hardware, too. (5) Semantic file system will take the “Once write, and read forever” for Hbase’s big files and “support data revision” for file-object storage files strategy.

5 Electronic Commerce Security Framework in the Cloud

Figure 3 is the electronic commerce security framework in the cloud. The biggest difference with the traditional EC security is that our added the certification for all these EC massive data.

Fig. 3
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Electronic commerce security framework in the cloud

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The electronic commerce security framework in the cloud is based on the traditional electronic commerce security framework. It mainly includes: (1) Security management. It is composed of Symmetric encryption, Asymmetric encryption, Digital Abstract, Digital envelope, Digital signature, VPN, IPSec, SSL and SET so on. (2) CA center. Like the traditional EC, CA is used to have a certification to every things in the framework. The most important is that we added the certification for massive data in the EC web sites.

6 Conclusions and Future Work

In this chapter, we constructed a cloud framework for electronic commerce applications and discussed some key technologies in this framework. In the future, our work will focus on the implementation and optimization of semantic cloud system.