As the e-commerce business grows and the demand for online spending becomes higher there is a need for a technical paradigm shift. This generates a necessity for a highly available and scalable on-premise infrastructure for the e-commerce websites. But managing a website in-house with all the servers, networks, security, backups and maintenance leads to an upsurge in the overhead cost which in turn increases the overall CapEx for any e-commerce industry.
Imagine if all of this comes in a suite as Software as a Service with an on-demand model.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers all these features of Highly Available, Flexible, Scalable, and Durable Infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go model virtually along with Magento which provides the flexibility of designing the recommendation engines for the e-commerce websites.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering the compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.
Features of AWS
- Elastic Web Scale Computing
- Highly Available
- Secure
- Complete Control
- Durable
- Pay as you go
- Global Infra
- Disaster Recovery
- Monitor and Store Logs
What is Magento?
Magento is an e-commerce platform built on open source technology which provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.
Magento Deployment on AWS
Components:
1. Application Load Balancer
An Application Load Balancer is a load balancing option for the Elastic Load Balancing service that operates at the application layer and allows you to define routing rules based on content across multiple services or containers running on one or more Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
2. Elastic Compute Cloud EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. While using Magento on AWS, these stateless applications are hosted on EC2 which are then configured in Auto Scaling to provide scalability during peak times.
3. Relational Database Service
a) Master DB – Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is Database service which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
b) Read Replica – Amazon RDS Read Replicas provides enhanced performance and durability for Database (DB) Instances. This replication feature makes it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB Instance for read-heavy database workloads. Read Replica is recommended in circumstances where the load has to be decreased for reads from Master use.
4. CloudSearch
Amazon CloudSearch is a search platform and a managed service in the AWS Cloud that makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application. This is an alternative for SOLR search engine also.
5. ElastiCache
a) REDIS – A fast, open source, in-memory data store, and cache. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible in-memory service that delivers the ease-of-use and power of Redis along with the availability, reliability, and performance suitable for the most demanding applications.
b) MEMCACHED – A widely adopted memory object caching system. ElastiCache is protocol-compliant with Memcached to be used for Session Storage.
6. S3 (Simple Storage Service) – Magento Static Media Contents
S3 is easy to use object storage, with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. Media contents such as Images, Videos are stored in the S3 bucket.
7. CloudFront – Content Delivery Manager
Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. CloudFront serves web pages, Images from edge location with best possible performance.
8. Amazon Simple Email Service
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cost-effective email service built on the reliable and scalable infrastructure that Amazon.com developed to serve its own customer base. With Amazon SES, you can send transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content to your customers.
Concluding this here, I would recommend using Magento deployment on AWS while developing your e-commerce websites and applications because the buying patterns of the consumers are changing by the minute. Being an open source and agile tool can certainly help you adapt and thrive to boosts your online sales while maximizing gross margins.