E-Commerce Acceleration via AWS ECS and DevOps

Industry: E-Commerce

Markets: USA / Global

Company Overview

Our client, a prominent e-commerce company, sought to enhance their Magento-based online shopping platform. Their goal was to deliver a seamless, scalable, and engaging shopping experience for users worldwide. They partnered with us to redevelop and optimise the platform by leveraging AWS services, ensuring high performance, low latency, and improved scalability to handle fluctuating traffic patterns efficiently.

Key Challenges

Developing a robust Magento e-commerce platform came with several critical challenges:

• Zero Downtime

  Ensuring uninterrupted service during regular maintenance, updates, or unexpected failures was crucial for maintaining customer trust and maximising sales opportunities.

• Scalability

  The platform needed to dynamically scale to accommodate varying traffic demands, especially during flash sales, promotions, and peak shopping periods.

• Traffic Management

  Managing high volumes of concurrent users during major events such as product launches and seasonal sales required an infrastructure capable of distributing load evenly and ensuring consistent performance.

• Resource Optimization

  Optimising resource utilisation was key to maintaining efficient operations, especially during periods of fluctuating demand. The platform needed to be able to scale down during off-peak periods to minimise costs without impacting performance.

• Security

  Protecting sensitive user data, including payment details and personal information, from potential cyber threats while ensuring compliance with data protection regulations was a top priority.

• Data Consistency and Redundancy

  Maintaining data integrity across multiple instances and clusters while ensuring redundancy to prevent data loss was essential for providing a smooth and reliable shopping experience.

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance

  To deliver a consistent and reliable experience for users worldwide, the platform needed to ensure high availability and be resilient to hardware failures or network outages.

Key Challenges

We architected a highly scalable and secure solution using AWS ECS with EC2 for hosting the Magento application, enabling the platform to handle high traffic loads, ensure high availability, and provide a seamless shopping experience.

• Multi-Cluster ECS Architecture with Route53

  The Magento application was deployed across multiple ECS clustersrunning on EC2 instances,each handling different components of the platform (e.g., frontend, backend, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.). We leveraged Amazon Route53 to manage connectivity between tasks across these clusters, enabling efficient communication and coordination between different services, including user sessions, payment processing, and order management.

  • Task Connectivity via Route53: Route53 was used to route internal service requests between ECS tasks across clusters, ensuring smooth interaction between backend services such as Redis caching, RabbitMQ for messaging, and Magento’s core services.

• Application Traffic Management with ALB

  All application traffic was routed through an Application Load Balancer (ALB), which distributed incoming user requests evenly across ECS tasks in multiple clusters.

  • Cross-Zone Load Balancing: The ALB was configured to balance traffic across multiple Availability Zones (AZs), improving fault tolerance and ensuring that no single AZ or ECS cluster was overwhelmed.

  • SSL Termination: We implemented SSL termination at the ALB using AWS Certificate Manager, ensuring that all user data was encrypted during transmission, thus enhancing the platform’s security posture.

• Persistent Storage with Amazon EFS

  We used Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) as persistent storage for media assets, such as product images and user-uploaded files.

  • High Availability and Scalability: EFS was configured to support high throughput and scale automatically as media content grew. The shared file system allowed all ECS tasks to access the same set of media files without conflicts, ensuring consistency across the platform.

  • Multi-AZ Deployment: EFS was deployed across multiple AZs, ensuring that media storage remained accessible even in the event of an AZ failure.

• Database and Caching Strategy

  To enhance performance and ensure data availability, we implemented a robust database and caching strategy:

  • Amazon RDS (MySQL): We used Amazon RDS (MySQL) for the platform’s primary database, ensuring high availability and automated backups across multiple AZs. This setup supported the transactional needs of Magento, such as handling customer orders, inventory management, and payment processing.

  • Amazon ElastiCache (Redis): ElastiCache was employed to cache frequently accessed data and manage session information, reducing database load and significantly improving the platform’s response times during high-traffic events.

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance

  To ensure that the Magento platform could handle failures without affecting the user experience, we implemented a high availability strategy across all layers of the infrastructure:

  • Multi-AZ ECS Deployment: ECS tasks were deployed across multiple AZs, allowing the platform to remain operational even if one AZ experienced downtime. This ensured uninterrupted service during hardware failures or other AZ-specific issues.

  • Auto Scaling: We configured auto-scaling for both ECS tasks and EC2 instances to dynamically adjust resources based on real-time traffic. This guaranteed optimal performance during traffic spikes while scaling down during off-peak periods to save costs.

  • Cross-Zone Load Balancing: The ALB was configured to distribute traffic across AZs, preventing any single AZ from being overloaded and providing a more consistent user experience.

• Enhanced Security and Compliance

  To safeguard the platform and ensure compliance with industry regulations, we implemented several key security measures:

  • IAM Roles and Security Groups: We enforced least-privilege access through IAM roles for ECS tasks, and tightly controlled traffic between services using security groups.

  • VPC and Private Subnets: The entire platform was deployed within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), with tasks running in private subnets to restrict direct access from the internet. Only essential services, such as the ALB, were exposed to the public.

  • WAF and DDoS Protection: We integrated AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect the application from common web threats, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Additionally, AWS Shield provided protection against DDoS attacks, ensuring that the platform remained operational during attempted disruptions.

Performance Milestones Achieved

• Seamless User Experience

  With the multi-cluster ECS setup and effective use of Route53 for task connectivity, the platform provided a seamless user experience, even during high-traffic periods like sales events. This improved the overall user satisfaction and helped retain customers.

• Scalability

  The use of ECS with EC2 enabled the platform to scale dynamically in response to changing traffic patterns. Auto-scaling ensured that resources were adjusted in real time, providing consistent performance regardless of user load.

• Cost Efficiency

  By leveraging Auto Scaling and optimising resource allocation, we reduced operational costs during off-peak hours. The pay-per-use model with EFS, RDS, and other AWS services ensured efficient resource utilisation without over-provisioning.

• Improved Security

  Through the combination of IAM roles, VPC security, and AWS WAF, we enhanced the platform’s security posture, ensuring the protection of user data and compliance with industry regulations.

• High Availability

  The deployment of services across multiple AZs ensured that the platform maintained high availability and fault tolerance. Even during unexpected infrastructure failures, users experienced uninterrupted service.

• Optimised Media Storage

  Amazon EFS provided scalable, shared storage for media assets, allowing the Magento application to handle high volumes of media content without performance degradation. This resulted in faster page load times and a more enjoyable shopping experience for users.