Cloud Ecommerce Solution

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.

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.

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.

AWS

Microsoft Azure

3 Different Stories of Cloud Adoption by Ecommerce Companies

Story 1. Ecommerce ecosystem migration to AWS

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.

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!