An e-commerce website such as Amazon.com has users from all parts of the world and a huge catalog with millions of products. Each product has multiple images, reviews, and videos. Maintaining such a big catalog for a global user base is a very challenging task.

This reference architecture follows SOA principles. Each service is operating as independently as possible from each other. This architecture can be implemented using either SOAP-based or RESTful-based web architecture:

As shown in the preceding architecture diagram, we can take note of the following:

• When a user types a website address into the browser, the user request reaches out to the DNS server to load the website. The DNS requests for the website are routed by Amazon Route 53 to the server where the web applications are being hosted.

• The user base is global, and users continue browsing for products to purchase as the website has a large product catalog with static images and videos. A content distribution network such as Amazon CloudFront caches and delivers static assets to users.
• The catalog contents, such as static product images and videos, along with other application data, such as log files, are stored in Amazon S3.
• Users will browse the website from multiple devices, for example, they will add items in a cart from their mobile and then make a payment on a desktop. To handle user sessions, a persistent session store is required such as DynamoDB. In fact, DynamoDB is a NoSQL database where you don't need to provide a fixed schema, so it is a great storage option for product catalogs and attributes.
• To provide high performance and reduce latency, Amazon ElastiCache is used as a caching layer for the product to reduce read and write operations on the database.
• A convenient search feature is key for product sales and business success. Amazon Cloud Search helps to build scalable search capability by loading the product catalog from DynamoDB.
• A recommendation can encourage a user to buy additional products based on their browsing history and past purchases. A separate recommendation service can consume the log data stored on Amazon S3 and provide potential product recommendations to the user.
• The e-commerce application can also have multiple layers and components that require frequent deployment. AWS Elastic Beanstalk handles the auto-provisioning of the infrastructure, deploys the application, handles the load by applying Auto Scaling, and monitors the application.

In this section, you learned about SOA along with an architecture overview. Let's learn more about the critical aspect of modern architecture design with a serverless architecture.