Case Study
InfraNET: Magento on AWS, ready for Black Friday and for every branch
eCommerce · Magento · Platform Engineering
InfraNET runs eCommerce sites on Magento. For an online store, the infrastructure has one job that matters more than any other: stay up and stay fast while people are buying, including on the days when everyone buys at once.
Cloudacio manages that infrastructure on AWS. We also built the platform InfraNET’s developers use to work on those stores: a complete environment for every branch, created when the work starts and removed when it ends.
Traffic to a store is never steady. Black Friday, a campaign, a promotion that lands better than expected: demand multiplies within hours, and those are the hours when an outage costs the most. Infrastructure sized for an ordinary Tuesday fails on the day that matters. Infrastructure sized for the peak sits idle, and paid for, the rest of the year.
The second problem was speed of development. Magento is a large application, and a change is hard to judge until it runs inside a full store. When a team shares a few staging environments, developers wait for their turn and features get tested on top of each other.
Hosted platforms such as Upsun (formerly Platform.sh) and Acquia answer this with an environment per branch. InfraNET wanted the same capability as its own: in its AWS account, under its control, and built with the tools its team already used.
For production, we run InfraNET’s Magento sites on AWS for high availability, with capacity that follows demand. The stores scale out when traffic climbs and back in when it passes, so a peak is absorbed instead of survived.
For development, we built an environment platform with Terraform and GitLab CI. A developer opens a branch to work on a feature, and the pipeline creates an environment for that branch where the feature can be seen and tested in a running store. Nobody files a request, and nobody waits for staging to be free.
When the work is finished, the environment destroys itself. Nothing is left running, so nothing is left on the bill, and the next branch starts from a clean copy.
InfraNET’s stores go into Black Friday and every other traffic spike on infrastructure built for them. Peak days are planned events, handled by the platform.
Its developers get what the hosted Magento platforms offer, a place to see each feature before it ships, without handing the stores to someone else’s platform. The Terraform code and the pipelines are InfraNET’s, the environments run in its own AWS account, and the team can change any part of how they work.
"Our Magento stores have to stay up when traffic peaks, and with Cloudacio they do. They also built us our own environment platform on AWS: open a branch, get a full environment for that feature, and it removes itself when the work is done."Patrick Steil, CEO at InfraNET