How Does the Virto Solution Support «Scaling Out» and «Scaling Up»?
Scalability is a critical functionality of an ecommerce platform. It doesn’t matter if you trade in B2B or B2C segments, your business faces traffic volatility all the time. It can be planned seasonal sales or unexpected bursts of visits and purchases. Your ecommerce capacity must be capable of handling its traffic peaks (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday).
The other reason for scalability is business growth. The increase in the popularity of your online store, integration of your ecommerce platform with new services, and overall company evolution leads to a corresponding level of online trading growth. To respond to business challenges and opportunities quickly, you need to have a flexible platform at the heart of your ecommerce solution.
In modern ecommerce business practices, scalability is achieved by placing the software platform in the cloud. One of the many advantages of the cloud is that it helps to be flexible and avoid physical superstructure, while you get all the required resources and services on demand.
What Do Scaling Up and Scaling Out Mean?
There are two workflows for scaling: scaling up and scaling out. This concept reflects the fact that, depending on the flow of visitors and the number of orders, both hardware and software must be scaled. The preferred cloud provider for Virto Commerce is Microsoft Azure, so let’s borrow the definition from them.
- Scale up: To allocate more CPU cores, memory, disk space, etc. For example, in Azure Cloud, you scale up by changing the pricing tier of the App Service plan that your app belongs to.
- Scale out: To increase the number of instances that run on the Virto Commerce app. In general, you can scale out to as many instances as you want. Keep in mind that several smaller instances of Virto Commerce work better than one larger one. It’s a good example of how cloud-native solutions work.
For even better scaling optimization, Virto Cloud PaaS uses auto-scale features with a 2 to 6 auto-scaling multiplier. A further increase in the number of instances is possible. Virto offers you a mechanism for optimizing the number of instances to avoid expensive charges from your cloud provider.
Moreover, Virto Commerce supports scale-out on persistent layers. Every module can use its own database for fast-scaling capabilities.
For business logic requiring extremely high scalability, we develop custom modules. Module recomposing is simple to do, thanks to Virto Atomic Architecture. An example is a high-performance order module, which is now included in the Virto Enterprise Pack and can be easily installed instead of the basic order-handling module.
Additional sources of information about Virto Commerce scalability in ecommerce:
- Scalable Virto Commerce Cloud
- Scale up an app in Azure App Service (Microsoft)
- Fundamentals — Scalability — Virto Commerce Documentation
- Requirements for the ecommerce API scalability architecture
- The business value of scalable ecommerce APIs
If you need more information about scaling, performance, integration methods, and how to run the Virto high-performance modules, please contact the Virto Commerce team.
Author: Oleg Zhuk
Business Product Owner at Virto Commerce
