PrestaShop

PrestaShop is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms, and most successful open-source projects. Around the world, more than 300,000 e-commerce stores run on PrestaShop technology. PrestaShop software enables businesses to run successful commerce businesses.

Brief results of the project:

• HADII developed and open-sourced a set of CloudFormation templates that enable Prestashop users to deploy the infrastructure required to enhance a containerized Prestashop installation with the following capabilities

  • Backups

  • Monitoring

  • Logging

  • Scalability

  • Dynamic cluster auto-scaling in response to user traffic

  • Multi-Site Disaster Recovery built in to all infrastructure components

The Need

Being a software-focused project, PrestaShop lacks many of the capabilities a full-fledged e-commerce store requires in order to be successful out of the box.

1. Getting to a state of “production-ready” is difficult - A great deal of effort and time is required to deploy and configure Prestashop to support backups, monitoring, auto-scaling, disaster recovery, and more.

2. PrestaShop does not scale well natively - PrestaShop has some guidance on scaling a PrestaShop instance which includes things like optimizing the settings for PHP, Database, Apache, cache, & PrestaShop itself. However, these recommendations are focused on enhancing the performance of PrestaShop more so than they are focused on addressing the issue of scalability.

The Challenge

Prestashop is typically meant to be scaled vertically by increasing the amount of compute resources made available to a static number of servers. As a result, simply deploying the containerized version of PrestaShop on a container orchestration platform like ECS on AWS posed numerous challenges, since all running containers needed to mount shared directories in a scalable manner.

The Solution

By relying on CloudFormation templates and the breadth of the AWS platform and its services, HADII consultants delivered a set of CloudFormation templates to deploy the necessary infrastructure around a containerized PrestaShop installation running on AWS ECS to provide backups, monitoring, logging, and stability to the environment.

The developed solution also enables the PrestaShop environment to scale in response to user traffic using CloudWatch based CPU and Memory alerts, and is extremely performant overall due to the use of AWS RDS and EFS for the primary PrestaShop database and container storage file systems respectively.