Cloud-native architecture is a cornerstone of our resiliency strategy, supporting businesses through higher influxes of traffic on days such as Black Friday, as well as providing an agile infrastructure. Here, we explore how commercetools Composable Commerce utilizes its underlying cloud infrastructure and the steps you can take to get started.
One of the ingredients of commercetools’ secret sauce is cloud-native SaaS architecture, which enables businesses to scale commerce capacity at speed during Black Friday-like traffic moments without having to provision hardware and software internally. Essentially, companies can outsource the heavy lifting of data center operations, so they can leverage auto-scaling, high availability, reliability and security offered by cloud computing providers.
Our infrastructure is cloud-agnostic, leveraging the cloud platforms of Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This multi-cloud strategy means an additional layer of flexibility for your business, ensuring global coverage and efficient load distribution within availability zones within a single region for online high performance and scalability.
Multi-tenancy is also a vital component of our architecture and works in tandem with cloud nativity. In short, multi-tenancy allows multiple customers (or “tenants”) to share the same application or infrastructure while keeping their data and processes separate and secure. Overall, a multi-tenant system has much higher limits for scalability than a single-tenant system. This approach makes sure all of our customers in a region are getting exactly the same experience while immediately benefiting from performance improvements and fixes.
And finally, a cloud-native architecture relies on independent APIs backed by microservices. Each microservice is deployed into the cloud, maintaining its own application layer, datastore and infrastructure, so expert teams can deploy updates through independent development and release cycles faster and more efficiently.
Together, these elements are critical to the resiliency, flexibility and scalability of commercetools Composable Commerce. Next, let’s dive a little deeper into commercetools’ underlying cloud infrastructure and how you can benefit from it.
The underlying cloud infrastructure for commercetools Composable Commerce
commercetools' offerings are available on cloud computing providers, which supply a built-in toolkit of highly available and scalable components that can be leveraged to create complex products while bringing significant cost and time savings. Here’s an overview of how the various elements of commercetools Composable Commerce’s architecture work together:
As a customer, you can deploy services that integrate with commercetools Composable Commerce in the cloud vendor of your choosing.
Moreover, cloud service architecture enables the ability for hardware infrastructure to be distributed across the globe via Regions and Availability Zones, which can be defined by:
Regions are independent geographic areas that consist of Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone is a deployment area for cloud resources and should be considered a single failure domain.
These zones have distinct locations with independent network connections and power supplies; however, zones within a region are strategically located to ensure round-trip network latencies of under 1ms in the 95th percentile.
Through Availability Zones, cloud deployments have a fully active/active availability within a region.
This is how Availability Zones are utilized within a Region:
What happens when you sign up for commercetools Composable Commerce:
Set up your cloud service within a specific Region, leveraging three Availability Zones within each region for maximum resiliency. This cloud deployment approach protects against application node and hardware failures, as well as system outages due to automatic maintenance as well as redundancies kept by the cloud provider.
Provision of your multi-tenant project with a unique logical database in our shared MongoDB instances upon creation. The logical databases share the same infrastructure resources but are otherwise separate. To achieve this, each tenant project can be provisioned with a unique logical database, which shares the same infrastructure resources but is otherwise logically separated by projects. We then manage access to these logically separated projects via our API credentials.
Provision of access to commercetools’ extensive library of APIs, GraphQL endpoints and our business tooling, Merchant Center. This “backend” cloud, as we call it, is entirely commercetools’ responsibility to maintain, update and upgrade for your benefit.
How to get started
commercetools Composable Commerce APIs are provided in six different Regions: North America (Google Cloud, Iowa), North America (AWS, Ohio), Europe (Google Cloud, Belgium), Europe (AWS, Frankfurt), Australia (Google Cloud, Sydney) and China (AWS, Ningxia).
These Regions are completely isolated from each other, and no data is transferred between them. User accounts created for one Region are not valid for other Regions. It’s important to know that selecting a Region does not prevent you from accessing data anywhere in the world; it’s simply where the data and services live and run.
To get started, a signup is required for each Region. Learn here how to set up your Region(s) using our Merchant Center and the Merchant Center API Gateway.
Cloud-native architecture to future-proof your business
Our cloud-native services eliminate the need for customers to manage the extensive scale and intricacies of infrastructure, hardware and security vulnerabilities associated with on-premises solutions. We alleviate the challenges and risks related to enterprise operations and security that are inherent in on-premises systems, facilities and software.
With commercetools Composable Commerce, powered by a cloud-native architecture under the hood, your business gains reliability, security and agility while reducing costs and complexity.
Learn more about cloud-native architecture by downloading our paper Migrating your Commerce Platform to the Cloud and learn how your business can make the move to the cloud with ease and speed with commercetools.