Category Cloud

Gartner at Modern Commerce Day on Composable Commerce

I attended some of the sessions this week at Modern Commerce Day (presented by CommerceTools). There were interesting sessions from companies such as how Lego has modernized their ecommerce site using serverless patterns, Express.com on migrating to a new architecture during COVID (online sales were their sole revenue stream due to physical stores being closed), […]

Next Generation Digital Commerce Architecture Daydreaming

Every so often I day dream of what a next generation ecommerce platform would look like. (Yes, this is one of those pie in the sky blogs.) First, I think SaaS platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, and so on do a great job for many ecommerce merchants. What I wanted to focus on in this […]

Do all these cloud services make designing e-commerce platforms easier?

Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure… its never been easier to spin up a new server. Then comes the raft of managed services: databases, message queues, scheduling, and more. And this is before you get to Kubernetes orchestration and automatic restarts or serverless programming models. But using these tools is it easier to build an […]

When Will We See Serverless Open Source e-Commerce Platforms?

Please note, this is a personal opinion piece. Serverless computing offers multiple appealing benefits: You only pay for the compute you use, which is appealing to both small (low budget) and large (cost efficient) merchants It takes away much of the pain of autoscaling and high availability Developers can focus more on business logic, less […]

Serverless Programming for Large Scale Systems – how useful is it really?

Serverless programming is a model where you write code without having to think about what servers you are running it on. You just deploy the code, and the serverless provider worries about how many servers to spin up for you based on load. The provider also performs automatic restart of servers that fail. AWS Lambda […]

Managing Large Catalogs (with Machine Learning)

Interested in the challenges of managing large catalogs? Then this Elasticon talk “Surfacing the Products You love on Spring” by Julie Qiu from Spring (@jqiu25) might interest you. Spring is a marketplace (lots of diverse data sources) focussing on fashion. The following is my quick summary of the presentation – for details, please watch the […]

Magento Cloud and Magento Marketplace Walkthrough

This blog is a walkthrough at how Magento Cloud and Magento Marketplace can be used together. I put this together as an exploration of development flows and experiences, and to share a bit more about the two products for those interested. What I personally am particularly interested in is exploring the potential experience for low […]

Fastly and Magento

This is a quick post on some of the technical benefits of Fastly and how it can be used with a Magento store. This is not intended as an endorsement of Fastly over other CDN offerings – it is just some technical information on Fastly that I think is interesting. Note: Magento Cloud has announced […]

Cloud Based Development Environments

  A few months back someone pointed me at cloud based PHP development environments. This was a new one for me. Really? Develop PHP applications in a web browser? Zero installation required? Are you serious? Well, after a few great technical discussions with the folks at Codeanywhere.com over the last few months, I am happy […]

Exploring Docker Volumes for Phases of Development

In this blog post I describe a possible Docker based development pipeline. I use building a Magento 2 web site as an example, but the approach is equally valid for any web site. The following draws together several Docker usage patterns in use today. Development Development occurs on your desktop or laptop (not in production!). […]