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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Building an Ecommerce Experience with Commercetools on AWS

Overview

This Guidance shows how you can build an ecommerce experience around the microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native software as a service, and headless (MACH) approach of commercetools. By integrating AWS services with commercetools, you can extend functionality to address common retail use cases. This integration can help you make quicker decisions related to brand design, helping you provide a consistent and seamless experience for your customers. 

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

CloudFront , Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon S3 , Amazon ECS , Lambda , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon Personalize , Kinesis Data Firehose , EventBridge , and Amazon SQS , are all managed services, eliminating operational overhead. Using managed services helps you offload infrastructure and server maintenance to AWS.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

CloudFront improves website security with traffic encryption and access controls. DynamoDB and Amazon S3 encrypt data at rest, and you have the flexibility to select the encryption key. Encrypting data at rest helps ensure that only authorized individuals can access data, preventing data leakage, unauthorized access, and physical theft.

Read the Security whitepaper 

ELB routes traffic requests from the store’s web and mobile application to healthy containers in Amazon ECS . Amazon ECS auto scales containers across multiple Availability Zones for high availability. Combining ELB with Amazon ECS reduces the chance of application failure for your business logic, meaning that users can browse the web and mobile storefront without encountering downtime errors.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

Amazon ECS scales containers running your business logic on demand, helping ensure that only the necessary compute resources are allocated. CloudFront serves requests through the closest edge location of the requester to reduce network latencies. This architecture allows you to sustain peak traffic (often a challenge in ecommerce) while serving requests through the closest edge location of the requester to reduce network latencies.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

Where possible, CloudFront eliminates the frequency of data access or microservice invocations through caching, resulting in lower compute costs. Amazon ECS reduces costs with efficient compute resource auto scaling by using AWS Auto Scaling . CloudFront caching enables Amazon ECS automatic application scaling to be cost efficient by provisioning the minimal amount of compute and allowing you to pay only for the resources you use.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Amazon ECS supports AWS Graviton processors, which use up to 60 percent less energy than comparable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for the same performance. To minimize your workload’s environmental impact, choose the latest Graviton processors for Amazon ECS andclean up unused data, snapshots, and backups at regular intervals.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.