#gigacommerce – Scalable online shops with 1 billion items and more

 

Does an online shop with 1 billion items work on a standard cloud server? And that even with the demand for very low response times? We investigated this question during the #gigacommerce project.

The #gigacommerce setup contains 1 billion articles, which are combined into 10 million products. Each item contains attributes, images, prices and text like in any online store. The basis is a Symfony, Laravel and TYPO3 installation with the Aimeos E-Commerce extension, which access an ElasticSearch server.

All three frontends have been extensively tested to find out where the limits are. The Aimeos components showed that they scale almost infinitely, with response times of around 100 milliseconds. Interestingly, the only absolute limit in the tests was not the available hardware, but the network bandwidth, which was used up at over 600 PI/second. This makes it particularly interesting for peak load situations and TV advertising.

How it this possible?

The special feature of the Aimeos e-commerce system is its high flexibility. Data can be stored in different backends, which use the appropriate technology depending on the requirements – like here ElasticSearch for the product data. This makes the system ultra fast and scalable. Nevertheless, Aimeos is not a special solution, but comparable with other major players in the industry.

The open source software Aimeos can be adapted to the most diverse needs, in particular to complex B2B requirements and delivers everything that is important for an online shop: product catalogs, shopping baskets, payment integration, order management, e-mails and all optimized for mobile devices. Aimeos is available for TYPO3, Laravel, Symfony, SlimPHP and Flow/Neos but the software can be integrated into any PHP application.

More about Aimeos #gigacommerce

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