Elevating eCommerce with DevOps

In today's dynamic ecommerce landscape, customers access websites through various devices, each with its unique specifications. The constant evolution of product content and the demand for seamless digital experiences add complexity to the development process. Moreover, managing large volumes of customer data and catering to immersive digital experiences further intensify the challenge.

Customers, in turn, expect instant results and have little patience for delays. A single moment of inconvenience could result in lost opportunities.

However, amidst these challenges, the silver lining emerges in the form of DevOps—a powerful solution that can revolutionize ecommerce growth. In this material, we explore how adopting a DevOps framework empowers businesses to scale faster while ensuring reliability and resilience.

Understanding DevOps: Speeding up eCommerce Success

DevOps is a comprehensive methodology that combines philosophies, practices, and tools to empower organizations to deliver applications and services at high velocity. By adopting a DevOps framework, companies can accelerate product development and launches, surpassing traditional software development approaches. The faster you can bring new products to the market, the greater your market share will be.

Breaking down silos between development, operations, and security teams lies at the core of the DevOps model. Some companies even merge these teams to foster seamless collaboration throughout the entire application lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and maintenance.

This shift to a DevOps methodology requires a cultural transformation. A key aspect of the DevOps philosophy involves dismantling barriers between traditionally isolated teams like development and operations. Instead, a collaborative approach is embraced to optimize developer productivity, ensure reliable and precise operations, and speed up release delivery.

In the DevOps mindset, the DevOps team takes full responsibility for the services they develop, placing customer satisfaction at the center of their focus rather than just following processes. It's a circular approach, seeing the entire application lifecycle as their ownership, leading to enhanced efficiency and results for organizations that adopt this model.

Meeting the IT Demands of eCommerce

Nowadays, eCommerce sites face soaring expectations. Customers demand a seamless, engaging, and convenient experience; any shortcomings can lead them straight back to search engines, never to return. To thrive in this competitive landscape, eCommerce web development must adhere to specific requirements, including short-term release cycles, rapid bug fixes, service stability, high availability (up to 99.9%), AI/ML integration, robust feedback loops, swift data processing, composable architecture and strong data storage with top-notch security.

DevOps offers an effective solution to address these challenges. The collaboration between developers and management becomes smoother and more agile, eliminating bottlenecks and boosting development and launch processes dynamically.

Iterative Development and Automated Testing in DevOps

Constant updates and deployments are essential to stay ahead. DevOps facilitates this process by promoting small, automated, and incremental builds that are swiftly pushed to production. This approach enables quick and frequent changes, ultimately creating an outstanding customer experience.

A critical aspect of the DevOps methodology is automated testing, ensuring the stability and bug-free nature of new code. Through continuous feedback loops, DevOps enhances the eCommerce platform's stability, optimizing the experience for both internal users and customers.

By employing automated testing frameworks and tools, DevOps can detect and fix bugs efficiently, accelerate the testing of new applications and features, expedite product deployment, minimize the risk of human errors, and streamline the overall testing process, leading to increased reliability.

Automated Infrastructure and Enhanced Security

In DevOps, manual processes are automated to mitigate the risk of human errors and save valuable time and resources. Infrastructure automation, in particular, offers numerous advantages, including faster turnaround, improved measurability, and efficient time management for developers. By automating routine tasks, the IT team can focus on enhancing applications and driving improvements rather than spending time on maintenance.

In addition to operational benefits, DevOps automation enhances security. Early collaboration between developers and security experts allows for improved security testing, while automation enforces security gates and facilitates compliance management. With the constant collection and management of customer data, eCommerce businesses are exposed to potential data breaches. DevOps helps address these concerns by reducing human error through automated configuration and updates, regular backups, extensive log files, and strict user roles and admin levels. This comprehensive approach to security minimizes risks and safeguards businesses against potential threats that could harm their reputation, customers, and financial standing.

When designing a secure eCommerce project, following points are usually taken into consideration:

• Automate server configuration and updates;
• Regularly create backups;
• Automate both full and incremental backup processes and ensure their verification;
• Correctly configure SSL and TLS;
• Implement role designation and restricted resource access;
• Harden remote access configurations & procedures;
• Isolate each application;
• Securely store infrastructure and application logs (or use special bug/issue tracking systems);
• Regularly check code vulnerability for security (SAST);
• Implement proper DDoS attack handling;
• Enforce a two-factor authentication (2FA) policy.

Agility and Resilience with DevOps

A DevOps framework empowers businesses to shorten the gap between ideas and production, enabling faster time-to-market for new features and applications.

With DevOps, companies can unleash a new level of speed, agility, and resilience, fostering software innovation and enhancing their competitive edge. Unlike other approaches, DevOps doesn't compromise stability for innovation.

At Mygento, we understand the challenges of the highly competitive eCommerce market. To win and retain customers, outstanding digital experiences are crucial. DevOps holds immense promise for eCommerce, offering improved collaboration, quick response to market demands, and the establishment of an agile and scalable infrastructure for rapid updates and deployments.

As eCommerce experts, we specialize in assisting companies worldwide in implementing DevOps frameworks. By partnering with Mygento, you can accelerate innovation, boost growth, and build exceptional digital experiences for your customers. Contact our team of experts today to discover how we can optimize your processes and strategy, leveraging technology to drive your success in the ecommerce realm.