Modernizing Proprietary E-commerce Platform Infrastructure

Abstract

This study was made for a Finnish company that develops a proprietary e-commerce platform. The need for the study came from the realization, that the infrastructure design that has been used till now might not be sufficient in the future, as the number of environments and the amount of traffic they receive increases. The current infrastructure had served the company well for years, but the design eventually turned out not to be as scalable as desired and didn’t provide the level of availability that was excepted from today’s systems.

The goal of the thesis was to create an improved infrastructure design for the e-commerce platform. This new design was expected to improve on the shortcomings of the current infrastructure and utilize available modern technological solutions and the latest trends in infrastructure design and DevOps. The final design was built upon three widely used technologies: Kubernetes, Redis and PostgreSQL.

As an additional result of this study, a proof of concept infrastructure was created to validate the feasibility of the final infrastructure design. The technologies used in the proof of concept infrastructure were evaluated and chosen from established best practices and current trends. The proof of concept environment provided a solid foundation to continue the development work on, with improvements on all the problem areas that were identified on the current infrastructure. The proof of concept infrastructure will act as a base for future development and will be further refined to be used eventually for production environment deployments.