Despite all of these inputs, I am still saying platform architecture depends upon various needs of the platform, hence there is nothing like one standard way, it will be always evolving. Hence let us look into some of the references for Highly Scalable Platform Architectures to understand even better
Netflix architecture looks very complex and it is micro-service architecture
Some highlights of Netflix Architecture, Hundred’s of microservices and one giant service. thousand’s of servers spread across the world, thousand’s of Content Delivery Networks, Netflix uses their own CDN called Open Connect
100s of microservices
1000s of daily production changes
10,000s of instances running in AWS cloud
10, 000, 000, 000 hours of streamed
This is how it looks 🙂
Reference: How Netflix works: the (hugely simplified) complex stuff that happens every time you hit Play
There are many ways to design the platform architecture, however every platform has its own unique requirements. The architecture of every platform can vary totally to meet the needs of respective platform.
There are many case studies to look into platform architecture which I will cover in different article, we can look into linked-in, ebay, Amazon and netflix architectures to get better understanding on Platform architecture.
For now in this article we will understand first approach that Having Multiple Apps with its own independent Database and Backend. For our understanding purpose we will consider designing a platform for an Amazon Kind of Online Shopping Platform
Platform Architecture for Amazon Kind of Online Shopping Platform with Multiple Apps Approach
If you consider Amazon kind of Online Shopping Platform, we first have to identify which are the different huge modules which are candidates for making it as a separate app altogether
Sellers or Vendors who sell the products
Seller is the one who has his shop and sell products in amazon
He should be able to add his products
He should be able to manage discounts, offers for his products
He should be able to dispatch his product
He should be able to manage his revenue/profit and other finance aspects
Buyers
The one who buy products in Amazon
He should be able to manage his Cart
He should be able to manage his delivery addresses
He should be able to do payment using his choice of payment mode
Product Dispatch Management
Tracking the product while dispatching from one place to another
Every city has a collection centers and products has to be managed for timely delivery
Products Delivery Management
Once product is reached the destination city it has to be picked by delivery person
Assign delivery person
Deliver to customer and update the status
receive cash in case is Cash-On-Delivery
Amazon Finance Management
This is kind of Super Admin Functionality
Managing refunds
managing failed transactions
Transferring money to Seller
I listed only few functionalities however there will be many more under each of these main features.
Why Can’t be its one super big Monolithic Application ? Rather than multiple Apps ?
To answer this question we have to think of following important aspects which we covered in our first Article Which are as follows
Scalability : For Amazon Kind of Applications, millions of requests will be coming every second. There are millions of users buying and millions of sellers selling and millions of products listed, millions of transactions happening. It is highly impossible to handle everything in one huge monolithic server, because every server has some upper limits with respect to hardware and capacity, one huge database to scale it to that level we have to divide it into multiple pieces and manage it independently.
Maintainability: It is very hard to maintain one huge monolithic app for such a huge volume.
Resilient: Any major update to particular part of the platform should not affect to other parts of the platform
Development: For amazon kind of huge platforms, they have huge team spread across the world and each teach is enhancing their own module by doing lot of research within their small team. It is not possible to manage development activity effectively if its one huge monolithic app
Now let us see how the Architecture Diagram looks: You can use various apps for designing Architecture Diagram
In the above diagram, each app is one server and it has its own database. There are third party services used commonly across many apps, like
Elastic Search Service : For faster product search, Elastic Database is must for better searching capability.
Cloudinary is another service used for multi media file handling
Authentication service is like firebase, auth0 for user authentication
Many more such services will be used
Advantages of Multi Application Platform Architecture
Scalability: In this architecture the platform is scalable to handle high traffic, because during peak time like Amazon big billion day, more and more people will buy products, the traffic will be too high for Consumer App. So in that case if its independent server by itself, we can increase the capacity of that server alone to handle millions of requests, however other apps may not need so much so at this stage.
