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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.

Cloud Ecommerce Solution - ScienceSoft
Cloud Ecommerce Solution - ScienceSoft

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.

Key benefits of cloud adoption for ecommerce businesses are:

  • Isolated development of microservices (and thus business functions) and fail-proof scalability of the whole ecommerce solution.
  • 99.99% availability.
  • Equally fast app performance during high- and low-traffic times.
  • Usage-based cost.

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.

Cloud Architecture for an Ecommerce Solution - ScienceSoft

* 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.

Head of Web Development at ScienceSoft

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.

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

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  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • Amazon Lightsail
  • AWS Outposts
  • AWS Batch
  • AWS Snow Family

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Web and mobile app development

  • AWS Amplify

Containerization

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

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  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry
  • AWS Fargate
  • AWS App2Container

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Databases and data storages

  • Amazon RDS
  • Amazon Aurora

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  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon ElastiCache
  • Amazon DocumentDB
  • Amazon Neptune
  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • Amazon S3 Glacier
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
  • AWS Storage Gateway
  • Amazon FSx
  • AWS Backup
  • CloudEndure Disaster Recovery

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Data analytics

  • Amazon Redshift
  • AWS Lake Formation

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  • Amazon Kinesis
  • AWS Glue
  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service
  • Amazon EMR
  • Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
  • Amazon QuickSight

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ML and AI

  • Amazon SageMaker
  • Amazon Elastic Inference

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  • Amazon Forecast
  • Amazon Comprehend

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Integrations

  • Amazon API Gateway
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

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  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  • Amazon MQ
  • AWS Step Functions
  • Amazon AppFlow
  • AWS AppSync

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Networking

  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon VPC

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  • AWS Transit Gateway
  • Amazon Route 53
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

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Security

  • AWS Key Management Service
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • AWS Security Hub
  • AWS Firewall Manager
  • AWS Shield
  • Amazon Detective

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Microsoft Azure

Cloud computing

  • Azure Functions
  • Azure CycleCloud

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  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets
  • Azure VMware Solution

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Web and mobile app development

  • App Service
  • Azure Maps

Containerization

  • Container Instances
  • Azure Kubernetes Service

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  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift
  • Azure Service Fabric

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Databases and data storages

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  • Azure Cache for Redis
  • Azure Database for MySQL/ PostgreSQL/MariaDB
  • Azure Database Migration Service
  • Blob storage
  • Azure Data Lake Storage
  • Azure Disk Storage
  • Azure Files
  • Azure HPC Cache
  • Azure Backup

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Data analytics

  • Azure Synapse Analytics
  • Power BI Embedded

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  • HDInsight
  • Data Lake Analytics
  • Azure Stream Analytics
  • Azure Databricks
  • Azure Data Factory

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ML and AI

  • Azure Machine Learning
  • Azure Cognitive Services

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  • Azure Bot Services
  • Language Understanding

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Integrations

  • API Management
  • Service Bus

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  • Event Grid
  • Azure API for FHIR

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Networking

  • Virtual Network
  • Load Balancer

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  • Azure DNS
  • Azure ExpressRoute
  • Content Delivery Network

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Security

  • Azure Active Directory
  • Azure Firewall

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  • Azure DDoS Protection
  • Web Application Firewall

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3 Different Stories of Cloud Adoption by Ecommerce Companies

Story 1. Ecommerce ecosystem migration to AWS

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.

Project details

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.

Project details

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.

Project details

ScienceSoft: Combined Expertise in Cloud Computing and Ecommerce

  • We have 12+ years of experience in cloud development and migration.
  • Our background in ecommerce services is even more impressive – 21 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.

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Development

We select optimal cloud services your business will benefit from and compose them into a decoupled, yet coherent, ecommerce solution.

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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.

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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.

Mountains Mountains Shadow

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.