A Scalable Magento 2 Architecture

Utilizing AWS ECR, Fargate, EFS, and Aurora

I write this post with mixed feelings as a company in my portfolio has recently decided to no longer on-board new Magento development projects due to various reasons beyond the scope of this post. However, we are still here to help with companies that are looking for a hand on designing infrastructure, maintaining the systems side of Magento environments, and migrating working Magento instances to the cloud.

For those of you who are not familiar, Magento is one of the most popular E-Commerce platforms used by e-tailers of all sizes. Perhaps it gained its popularity due to the fact that it’s an opensource project with a freely distributed community edition helping lots of companies build out powerful e-commerce websites quickly at extremely low costs. It has also in the past been one of the only few choices in its class that could efficiently handle large amounts of SKUs until the recent years where some of its competitors have caught up a bit. According to Wikipedia, there are over 100,000 stores globally that run on Magento and the software itself has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. In 2018, Magento was acquired by Adobe for 1.68 billion US dollars, effectively becoming one of the members of Adobe’s brigade of web presence building tools.

As you can tell from the above, even though we always advice customers to build out their e-commerce sites the right way from the start with custom builds rather than using pre-built template based platforms for many very good reasons, it’s extremely easy for budget conscious businesses to be tempted to go with a template based platform to reduce up-front costs instead. Whether this is a good decision or not is yet another topic beyond the scope of this post. However the point is that because of this phenomenon, we have over the years done quite a bit of work with Magento and some of the other platforms like WooCommerce, Odoo, and even Shopify.

Background

Around two years ago, a friend’s company running 3 e-commerce websites on a single Magento 1.9 instance came to me and asked for some help with their site. Apparently, at the time, the site would keep on crashing especially during high season and that was causing them business…