Building a Resilient E-commerce Platform to Handle Extreme Peak Traffic
Marketplace.co, a rapidly growing online marketplace, faced critical stability
issues. Their monolithic PHP application, running on a cluster of virtual
machines, couldn't handle the traffic spikes of major sales events, leading to
lost revenue and customer frustration. They needed a scalable and secure
platform to support their growth.
Key Challenges:
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Traffic Spikes: The system would crash during flash sales
and holiday promotions.
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Slow Page Load Times: Poor performance was hurting their
SEO rankings and conversion rates.
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Security Vulnerabilities: The legacy codebase had numerous
unpatched vulnerabilities, posing a significant risk.
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Manual Scaling: The team had to manually add servers before
every sales event, a process that was slow and error-prone.
Our Cloud-Native Solution:
We re-architected their platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with a focus on
auto-scaling, performance, and security.
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Containerization & Orchestration: We containerized the
application and deployed it on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), enabling
horizontal pod autoscaling to handle traffic spikes automatically.
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Headless Architecture: We decoupled the frontend from the
backend, creating a headless commerce setup with a React-based frontend and
microservices for cart, checkout, and payment.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN): We implemented Cloudflare
to cache static assets at the edge, dramatically improving global page load
times.
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Integrated DevSecOps: We built a CI/CD pipeline in GitLab
that included automated container scanning with Google Container Registry
and dynamic application security testing (DAST).