Microservices for eCommerce

 

An overview:

The concept of Microservices is to enable eCommerce businesses to adapt to the market demands quickly, stay on the cutting edge of technology and also enhance customer experience.

Intricately speaking, Microservices refers to the type of software architecture that breaks down one extensive application into several different portions based on different functionalities. Each component is more or less independent of the other and has its own code base and a separate data model. They communicate with one another through a set of well-defined APIs.

Microservices usually are standalone functionalities of the services on the eCommerce platform, which means that the administrator can make changes on one service, which affecting the other services or functionalities of the application. This helps the eCommerce platform to become highly scalable and any delays in implementing the functionalities are eliminated.

In a typical eCommerce online site, services like payment process, shopping cart, product selection, shipping, etc all are treated as Microservices.

Scaling up from Monolithic architecture:

Before the advent of Microservices, all business apps were on a single source code, built into a single unit of deployment, which termed as Monolithic approach, this about twenty years back. Back then, making even small changes to an existing app would require fresh full version update with its own quality assurance process, increasing the app’s deployment time and increase in workload of multiple contributing teams. And if there are any errors in deployment, then the whole app would have to be taken offline, rebuild and fixed, this led to downtime across the range of the offered services. All Monolithic apps are built as one single unit, with all the functionalities running at the same time.

Reasons of dependability on Microservices

1. Flexibility: It enables a small independent team of developers to take ownership of each service, in terms of building, issue resolution, updates, etc. Their responses are faster and hence shortening the development cycle. Also, the developers can use services written for certain functions as the building blocks for other features, and also have the flexibility to use public APIs to integrate functions from third parties, this gives them enough flexibility to create new capabilities without writing code from scratch.

2. Scalability: As a network of service components, each service for each feature, can be scaled independently to meet the infrastructure needs, costs and support availability if a service sees a spike in activity.

3. Specialisation: Each microservice is designed to provide a certain set of capabilities and to solve a specific problem. This gives flexibility to the developers to choose the best tools to solve each problem, as there is no defined uniform approach for designing microservice.

4. Easy deployment:As Microservices are modular and supports continuous integration and delivery, it’s relatively easy to update code, experiment with new ideas, get new features to market, and rollback updates if something doesn’t work.

5. Progressive:Microservices architecture is ever evolving that makes it ideal for the app to anticipate and adapt to the types of devices that might access your service. Many apps start based on monolithic architecture but gradually revamp into Microservices that interact through APIs.

 

eComchain bringing the Future of Microservices:

1. Serverless architecture: To implement the Microservices, developers can execute code on-demand, without having them to think about server capacity, redundancy, and runtime environment. This helps developers rapidly build, test, and deploy new services without the need for large upfront investments. And currently, eComchain uses the AWS Lambda to provide these services their developers.

2. Edge computing: Edge computing aims to improve performance, reduce latency, and enable Microservices applications to run more efficiently and with increased processing power, and eComchain brings the Edge computing advantage of modern technologies like Single Page Applications (SPAs), and Content Distribution Network providers like Cloudflare and Fastly to enable services closer to people.

3. API-driven Next-Generation eCommerce: Multiple storefronts can be launched, on different frontend technologies on multiple platforms with agility by eComchain, as it delivers true Microservices architecture with their API driven eCommerce platform, where the front end in fully decoupled from the backend.

4. eComchain mitigates scaling challenges: With Microservices architecture, the frontend and backend can be scaled up or down, depending on the traffic on the site. If there is heavy traffic on the frontend, it will not affect the backend operations.

5. Open-source technology: With open-source technology, eComchain accelerates innovations and enables rapid implementation and with the decentralized development processes, it becomes easier for developers to collaborate and enable the app to get to the market faster.

6. Pick and choose: eComchain enables being technology agnostic, and also be able to pick and choose the service provider for what they are known for, enables to get the best of the breed for the frontend and backend applications. Additionally, use only what you need for your business processes, with each Microservices serving a business function.

7. Limitless Customization: Multiple storefronts with a myriad of customizations and user experiences, eComchain can connect the app to one backend system, providing multiple integration points to the backend.