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Cloud Ecommerce Solution
Ready-To-Use Architecture, Required Cloud Services
In cloud computing since 2012, ScienceSoft offers you to leverage cloud services and build a scalable and fail-proof ecommerce solution.
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Modular, Cloud-Native Commerce Solutions Are No Longer a Privilege, Forrester Says
Let’s take a closer look at this idea of Forrester. Until recently, only the most digitally mature companies adopted modular cloud-based ecommerce solutions. Others traditionally opted for monolith platforms because they are easier to deploy. But even if sold under a SaaS model and hosted in the cloud, platforms were always limited in scalability and behaved unstably during demand spikes.
Recent years brought a clear understanding that to survive and thrive, commerce businesses need to be truly agile and evolve faster amidst changes in customer behavior or supply chains. Not only enterprise-grade companies but also mid-market players started migrating to cloud composable ecommerce solutions. And forecasts show the same trend – ReportLinker predicts that cloud adoption in the whole retail sector will continue to grow by nearly 20% yearly.
Cloud Ecommerce: the Essence
Cloud ecommerce is an ecommerce solution built entirely from cloud technologies in order to gain solution scalability and fast time-to-market for new features and updates.
Cloud architecture of an ecommerce solution is a collection of containerized microservices hosted in the cloud environment and connected to cloud data storage and analytics tools. The solution is commonly integrated with ecommerce-specific cloud services such as search or personalization engines.
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Key benefits of cloud adoption for ecommerce businesses are:
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Cloud Architecture for an Ecommerce Solution
In our sample architecture diagram, we emphasize key possibilities provided by the cloud techs for ecommerce businesses:
- Microservices-based structure to build and evolve each function separately, without affecting the whole application. This enables much-needed business agility.
- Multi-availability zones to ensure low-latency connectivity and fast app performance for customers in different geographical locations. This is important for international ecommerce businesses.
- Auto scaling service to automatically adjust cloud computing capacity to traffic fluctuations. This allows companies to minimize the cost of cloud resources during slow sales and ensure unfailing app availability and performance during sales peaks.
- Cloud-native personalization and multichannel communication tools to enable data-driven inbound (in ecommerce apps) and outbound (via marketing channels) personalization.
- Cloud-native data analytics to use massive customer and business data for decision-making.
* An official AWS Select Tier Services Partner, ScienceSoft demonstrates a cloud architecture built from AWS** tools and services to make our example more down-to-earth. Still, our expertise is not exclusively AWS-centered, we also work with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and DigitalOcean.
**AWS, Amazon Web Services and other AWS Marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.
An approach to cloud security must be holistic.
Not only the perimeter of the whole cloud environment should be protected from external security threats, but inter-service communication needs protection too. We create a zero-trust or minimum-trust environment by implementing a validation mechanism at the edge of each microservice. This way, a microservice doesn’t expose data instantly at the request from other microservices – it validates the certificate first and decides whether the certificate and the calling microservices can be trusted.
Cloud Services and Tools Used to Architect Ecommerce Solutions
We’ve outlined the most comprehensive technology stack for the two most-used cloud providers – AWS and Microsoft Azure.
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Note: Cloud services and tools often perform overlapping functions. Competent cloud consultants will help you select the stack and not overpay for unneeded resources. |
AWS
Cloud computing
- Amazon EC2
- AWS Lambda
Web and mobile app development
- AWS Amplify
Containerization
- Amazon Elastic Container Service
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Databases and data storages
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon Aurora
Data analytics
- Amazon Redshift
- AWS Lake Formation
ML and AI
- Amazon SageMaker
- Amazon Elastic Inference
Integrations
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Networking
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon VPC
Security
- AWS Key Management Service
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Microsoft Azure
Cloud computing
- Azure Functions
- Azure CycleCloud
Web and mobile app development
- App Service
- Azure Maps
Containerization
- Container Instances
- Azure Kubernetes Service
Databases and data storages
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Cosmos DB
Data analytics
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Power BI Embedded
ML and AI
- Azure Machine Learning
- Azure Cognitive Services
Integrations
- API Management
- Service Bus
Networking
- Virtual Network
- Load Balancer
Security
- Azure Active Directory
- Azure Firewall
3 Different Stories of Cloud Adoption by Ecommerce Companies
Story 1. Ecommerce ecosystem migration to AWS
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The story is about a cashback marketplace that aggregates thousands of branded webstores and travel companies on a single platform and lets shoppers find the best deals and earn cashback from every purchase. The marketplace's popularity was growing but, unfortunately, that brought not only joy and profit to the company. The problem was in poor marketplace performance. The company ran 20 servers and, when the number of visitors increased, the servers couldn’t handle the load and crashed. |
ScienceSoft saw the solution in migrating the entire infrastructure to the cloud (AWS) to achieve the needed scalability.
First, our team migrated the web servers to Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), configured them based on Red Hat Linux and transferred 100GB of data to AWS without any downtime.
Then, we split the application into microservices and distributed the data among a number of external storages, such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), RDS (Rational Database Service) and DynamoDB (NoSQL database service), to make the application more scalable.
AWS services and tools used: Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB.
Story 2. A scalable B2B ecommerce platform for 30,000+ suppliers
A B2B ecommerce business needed a scalable solution capable of handling millions of transactions without fail. The company chose Azure SQL Database for its SLA with 99.99% availability, which allows them to have a highly performant platform. To grab Azure possibilities beyond data storage, they implemented ML-powered Azure Databricks to plan and optimize business operations.
Azure services and tools used: Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Table Storage, Azure Files, Azure Databricks, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery.
Story 3. A cloud-native system for B2B marketing and order placement
A food and beverage wholesaler wanted a faster and more convenient way of informing its clients (retailers) about best deals and accepting orders (compared to the existing email-based workflow). The company created a cloud-native mobile app that runs on Amazon EC2 instances. Incoming orders are stored in Amazon S3 and then replicated in a company’s order-capture system. As a result, retailers can place orders from any place and on the go.
AWS services and tools used: Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudFront.
ScienceSoft: Combined Expertise in Cloud Computing and Ecommerce
- We have 11+ years of experience in cloud development and migration.
- Our background in ecommerce services is even more impressive – 20 years.
- We work with market-leading cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and DigitalOcean.
- We have solution architects in the team who focus on microservices and cloud-native architectures.
What Exactly We Can Offer to You
One of the reasons we love cloud transformation so much is that it’s available to ecommerce companies at any stage of their being. Young businesses are in a winning position – they can plan their ecommerce solution for growth from the very start. Mature businesses can gradually migrate to the cloud if they are suppressed by the rigidness of their current solutions.
ScienceSoft successfully works with all the scenarios.
Consulting
If you don’t have a clear vision for cloud adoption, ScienceSoft will help you spot improvement opportunities that cloud techs can create in your case, assess their business impact and elaborate an action plan.
Development
We select optimal cloud services your business will benefit from and compose them into a decoupled, yet coherent, ecommerce solution.
Migration
ScienceSoft will assess your current IT ecosystem and plan its migration to the cloud to cause minimum-to-none disruptions to your business operations. The job will involve much re-architecting to make the software cloud-native and achieve maximum scalability at the best cost.
Benefits of Cloud Transformation for Ecommerce
Throughout our guide, we mentioned great benefits cloud techs promise to ecommerce businesses. It’s time to nail them down!
Dynamic evolution
When evolving your ecommerce cloud solution, we work on the level of microservices and don’t interfere in the operation of the whole cloud ecommerce platform. This allows us to accelerate and facilitate the delivery of new features.
99.99% availability
In 2021, a one-hour outage cost Amazon an estimated $34 million in sales. We hope you’ll never learn what the figure is for your business. Cloud services minimize the risk of downtime, have multi-zone architecture and automated failover to other availability zones if any component fails.
Speed
You don’t need to prepare for the periods of increased traffic. Cloud autoscaling will do the job – just the required amount of cloud resources will be allocated to keep your ecommerce app operating fast under any load.
Cost-effectiveness
Most likely, you don’t need maximum cloud resources 24/7, as there are peak traffic periods and off-peak times. And the good news is that with cloud autoscaling you pay only for the resources you’ve used.
May your business get boundless scalability at the best cost – all by leveraging the cloud!
And ScienceSoft will be happy to guide your cloud transformation journey and make the transition stress-free and most rewarding.