eCommerce businesses have their website as their whole business. The business outgrows its platform in no time and becomes prey to scalability, flexibility, and other issues. So how do you keep up with the rising customer demands and manage to enhance your revenue? Growing competition, new strategies, and advancing customer expectations mean that brands need to be fast, flexible, and responsive. Failing to manage these complex issues and rising customer expectations could damage your brand value. As an eCommerce business, you require a modular architecture to add, remove, and replace any feature or functionality without disturbing other components.
This is where Microservices come into the picture. Most businesses have started vouching on a technology stack that offers a ‘best-of-breed’ solution for their growth and manages a dynamic eCommerce landscape. MACH brings the possibilities for an eCommerce business to stay ahead in the eCommerce business. It is an acronym for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless architecture of individual components clubbed for the best possible eCommerce experience.
This is a Monolith to MACH series of 4 informative articles, each explaining different components of the MACH architecture. Let’s begin…
“In short, the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and are independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.” – James Lewis and Martin Fowler (2014)
MACH architecture and Microservices are booming among eCommerce developers — some people’s first reaction is, the Microservices -what?
The microservices architecture is defined as the service-centric approach to combine loosely coupled, strongly encapsulated, independently deployable, and scalable application components or ‘services’ to compose a single yet complex application for faster, reliable, and agile application development and deployment. The microservices approach is an integral part of MACH’s architecture strategy to redefine the eCommerce customer experience for the world of a futuristic shopping landscape.
Akin to LEGO building block architecture, microservices architecture has a decoupled micro application approach to work in sync without impacting other applications, which is likely a reason for the rise of microservices. As it stands right now, microservices architecture is taking place as the next-gen technology stack, yet there have been more reasons for this transformation, have a look.
Technical debt – A single or more components reached a level where further improvement mandatorily needed major changes turned into technical debts.
Single codebase – Monolith used to be a centralized core functionality that keeps all the components on a single codebase.
System logic change risks – Tightly coupled frontend, system logic, and business logic made it riskier to change it for required scalability.
Dependency on plugins – Earlier architecture used to rely heavily on plugins to enrich the functionality.
Lack of continuous deployment capabilities – Lack of continuous deployment restricts scalability, and manual testing with deployment increases the time to market.
Lack of digital maturity & integration freedom – In the competitive environment, new solutions, UX, and IT resources are required, but it restricts to achieving digital maturity.
Hardwired backend – Monolith architecture or traditional backend used to be hardwired with the frontend, so change into any component potentially affects the others.
Personalization engine missing – Missing personalization engine cannot meet the rising customer expectations and optimize their experience.
Unable to integrate next-gen tech AI & ML – Without disturbing the presentation layer of tightly coupled components, unable to introduce AI and ML technologies
Microservices architecture is based on loosely coupled applications and components to break the limitation bearers of monolithic architecture. What more should a developer know about the technology stack of microservices; so here, we have the technologies appropriate for various microservices projects.
Docker and Kubernetes
Comes with the software as a self-container orchestration tool that enables developers to develop, test, and then deploy the software as a self-contained package for easy deployment in complex scenarios with high scalability.
REST (REpresentational State Transfer)
During the deployment process, microservices need to communicate with other microservices; here, REST enables direct communication by creating RESTful APIs, and JSON, HTML, and XML standard formats enhance other requests.
Redis
This single-threaded NoSQL or key-value database gives a master-replica replication to support persisting data as well as works effectively with linked traditional database systems parallel to in-memory databases.
Consul
This HTTP REST API technology is used in microservices to enable communication among microservices units and perform health checks to exclude non-performer units.
Golang
Bring this language into your microservices for concurrency and API support features that have the capability to improve the device productivity and scalability too.
Python & Java
These programming languages enable the integration of different technologies, easy annotation nature, and fast and simplified prototyping in application development.
Routing layer
It places a gateway in multiple microservices architecture to expose a single endpoint. Thus the client only needs to know and communicate with a single endpoint.
CI/CD pipeline
With its capability to scale and agile development, microservices offer Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) for faster development.
By taking the time to carefully observe, analyze, and feature comparison, microservices architecture seems promising for future investment by transforming the present of eCommerce applications and customer experience. Let’s look over the benefits of microservices that help to transform your platform into a truly experience-centric futuristic shopping experience.
Agility
Microservices bring agility to your development process. A relevant application component can be added or updated whenever needed without disturbing others. It removes the integration process’s complexity and reduces the development time from months to a few weeks only.
Efficiency
A thoughtful strategy and careful use of code and underlying infrastructure can save you a fortune to bring highly efficient infrastructure costs. In some cases, the cost to run applications in this infrastructure became half what it used to be earlier.
Resilience
Microservices architecture has the resilience capability, a prerequisite of modern-age application development. You will get a lower and limited downtime with the freedom to scale for rising requirements.
Revenue
Less downtime, faster iteration, and freedom to scale increase your revenue for application development with microservices architecture.
“71% consumers expect personalization and if they don’t find it then 76% of them get frustrated.” – McKinsey & Company
In the world of digital-first experience, customers have the capability to decide the business offerings and drive them for a personalized experience. eCommerce businesses can’t afford to have a poor application and lose the entire brand value easily. Customers have rising expectations from businesses, be it B2B or B2C, and now D2C too. Omnichannel, microservices, and “Modern” Applications have an integrated opportunity to lure customers for the desired experience.
For this strategic move, businesses can quickly run multiple user-facing applications with the same backend for a seamless user interface (UI) irrespective of the platform or channels. At each level at a brick-and-mortar store, eCommerce, or maybe Instagram shoppable posts, the enhanced customer experience (CX) will be consistent. Omnichannel with microservices helps businesses reduce many challenges, such as abandonment cart rates, low customer loyalty, and many more.
If you want to explore a true futuristic eCommerce platform, here is one that we vouch for:
commercetools adopts a Microservices-based approach, breaking down complex eCommerce functionalities into smaller, independent components. Each microservice handles a specific business function, such as product catalog, order management, pricing, and customer data. This modularity promotes flexibility, scalability, and easy maintenance. It enables agile development, allowing businesses to quickly respond to market demands and launch new features. Since each microservice can be developed, tested, and deployed independently, it streamlines the development process and accelerates time-to-market for new initiatives.
With commercetools as your eCommerce platform, businesses can build advanced personalization capabilities. commercetools integrates seamlessly with AI and machine learning services, enabling businesses to analyze customer behavior and deliver targeted recommendations, boosting customer engagement and loyalty. Additionally, it provides developers with powerful tools, SDKs, and a developer-friendly environment. This empowers developers to work efficiently and collaboratively, fostering innovation and encouraging the creation of unique features and functionalities.
Customers are smarter with the growing use of information spread across the broader internet landscape. Their expectations have reached a new high with each passing day. With each customer, the experience has a new definition which is challenging to deliver with the monolith-based application. While the introduction of new-age technologies brings great relief, the adoption of these technologies is still going at a slow pace. The Microservices architecture of MACH for eCommerce application development helps to offer personalized services at scale for a customer-centric business model. ‘Do more with less’ and gaining customer loyalty is easier with microservices.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
15 February, 2024 In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B eCommerce, staying ahead of the curve is crucial for businesses aiming for sustained growth and success. In 2023, the rise of B2B eCommerce has been nothing short of revolutionary, with businesses embracing innovative solutions to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive revenue. One such groundbreaking approach gaining traction is Composable Commerce, a strategy that empowers businesses to assemble and orchestrate their commerce stack to meet specific business needs. In this blog post, we will explore the significance of Composable Commerce for B2B businesses and delve into why commercetools emerges as the go-to platform for unleashing its full potential.
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