DevOps for high-load marketplaces

Global quarantine had lead to a significant increase in traffic for online marketplaces. We list the benefits of using DevOps for high-load marketplaces here.

Online marketplaces experience a 30% boom in traffic since the beginning of quarantine due to the COVID-19 outbreak due to the SimilarWeb report from July 2020. People have to buy multiple goods on the Internet, as their freedom to travel and commute is limited until the end of the quarantine. All online marketplaces vary in their assortment of goods, timeframes of shipment and other characteristics, but all of them must adhere to the same model of operations and ensure stable online availability and uninterrupted end-user experience.

However, not all online marketplaces and eCommerce solutions are able to easily scale up to the challenge and implement new features quickly enough. With the pressure of increased customer demand, online marketplaces need to be more flexible, be able to implement customer feedback in form of new features more rapidly and ensure their systems can handle the high load at all times.

This is where DevOps can be of great use, as this methodology of software development and cloud infrastructure management allows minimizing the time-to-value for your IT operations, roll out updates quickly, deliver new features rapidly and ensure stable performance of your systems under high loads while providing secure operations at the same time. Most modern online marketplaces have this sorted through the services from their cloud computing providers or through the means of their eCommerce platforms.

How DevOps can help high-load marketplaces

As we discussed above, to be successful in crisis, your online platform must be scalable, secure, flexible, feature-rich and reliable. This is how using DevOps workflows can help you achieve these results:

• Scalability — every cloud computing provider enables scalability features like autoscaling groups that ensure you always use only as many computing instances as needed to handle the traffic load at hand. However, configuring these correctly is easy only using cloud platform-specific tools, which leads to vendor lock-in. DevOps teams have ample experience with using open-source tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes to build the required infrastructure and processes, as well as Nginx and Ingress for load balancing and autoscaling.
• Security — financial details of your customers are very sensitive data and they must be stored securely. By using open-source HashiCorp Vault or its platform-specific analogs like Amazon Key Management System, DevOps engineers can enable secure storage of all sensitive data in a hashed form, so it cannot be used by fraudsters even if they manage to obtain it.
• Flexibility — to be able to implement customer feedback rapidly and add new features to your platform quickly, it is best to work with experienced software development teams. Luckily, most Managed DevOps services providers like IT Svit field dedicated software delivery teams in addition to DevOps expertise, so you get an end-to-end solution allowing you to adjust your platform to the ever-changing customer demands with ease.
• Feature-richness — this can be ensured through adding more add-ons and plug-ins, developing bespoke modules if there are no readily available components or integrating your eCommerce platform with third-party products. Skilled DevOps specialists and software engineers can provide easy integration through RESTful APIs to enable a smooth and seamless integration of any features into your online marketplace.
• Reliability — one of the worst things that can happen to an eCommerce platform is inaccessibility due to server failure, post-update crash or DDoS attack, etc. DevOps engineers can prevent this by implementing CI/CD pipelines for automated rollout/rollback; enabling extensive automated unit, integrity and functional testing; performing secure releases and automated backup/recovery; enabling in-depth infrastructure security through using bastion hosts and private subnets to minimize your attack exposure surface and configuring the DDoS protection in the most cost-efficient.

To wrap it up, working with a reliable DevOps team can be the key difference between turning this crisis into a growth booster or crumbling due to your online marketplace not being able to handle high workloads. But how to find a trustworthy DevOps company?

IT Svit is one of the leaders of the IT outsourcing market in Ukraine and the leading Managed DevOps Services Provider worldwide according to an international technology consultancy Clutch from Washington, D.C. We provide software development and DevOps services for more than 15 years and have ample experience with developing and supporting eCommerce solutions at scale. More than 35 positive IT Svit customer reviews on CLutch highlight our expertise, professionalism and high quality of project management.

If you want to leverage all the opportunities opened by the current crisis and turn it into a trampoline for sustainable growth of your high-load marketplace — ordering DevOps services from IT Svit can be the best solution. Contact us with the project requirements, we are always ready to assist you!