Performance and scalability

Last updated:
Edit on GitHub

Spryker Commerce OS was built to enable the development of high-performance e-commerce applications that can support an extremely high number of unique visitors. However, no application can be both light and heavy at the same time.

Therefore, we have two applications: Yves and Zed. Both communicate with each other using remote procedure calls. Both use dedicated data stores, and therefore no cache is needed. Complex business logic operations are handled by the backend application.

Fast execution time

Depending on the server’s performance, the execution time for the frontend application is around 50 ms, which is fast enough to run any commerce application using a small infrastructure, even with a high amount of daily visitors.

Scalability, as an integral part of the core architecture, is achieved by separating the frontend (Yves) and backend (Zed) applications. A shared-nothing architecture ensures that every node of Yves has its own instance of the client-side data stores. New nodes can be easily added or removed ad hoc.

Yves and Zed

Separation of Responsibilities

The backend is only required for more complex business logic such as cart calculations and payments.

Yves

Yves is the slimline frontend application that gets its data from fast Key-Value storage like Redis, and a Search storage like Elasticsearch.

Yves is built on top of Symfony components and uses Twig as its templating engine. It has no connection to the database in Zed.

Some of the key features:

  • Based on Symfony components
  • Redis for storage
  • Elasticsearch for full-text search and facet navigation
  • Multi-language support
  • Shared session storage
  • SEO friendly

Zed

Zed is more of a heavy-duty backend application. Like Yves, it’s built on top of Symfony components and uses Twig. The main purpose of Zed is to take care of business logic, persistent data, and to connect to external systems.

Some of the key features are as follows:

  • Based on Symfony components
  • MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL support
  • UI framework
  • Database schema management and migrations
  • Advanced cron-job scheduling with Jenkins
  • CLI tools
  • OMS Code Management Tools
  • Application Integrity Checks

Data synchronization

No full page cache problems

Our frontend works without a full page cache. This allows continuous updates and avoids the problems of outdated product information. This way, tracking, stock information, and all the other details are always up to date.

In order for Yves to display any data, the data has to be first aggregated and exported.

The synchronization happens in three steps:

  • Touch
  • Collect
  • Export