Executive Summary
A US building supplies and architectural hardware retailer was struggling to serve a B2B/B2C Magento 2 catalogue of thousands of SKUs from a hosting platform that buckled under traffic spikes. Logicata designed a fully AWS-native multi-tier architecture with auto-scaling, Varnish caching, and fully managed data services. Page load times dropped, peak ordering periods stopped requiring manual intervention, and the customer’s engineers stopped maintaining databases and middleware they no longer needed to own.
Customer Overview
Sector: E-commerce / Building Supplies
Location: United States
The customer is a US-based retailer of building supplies and architectural hardware, serving both trade and retail buyers nationwide. Their Magento 2 platform underpins a large product catalogue and faces predictable traffic spikes during trade shows and promotional periods. The site is mission-critical to the business: every minute of downtime, every slow page, costs orders.
The Challenge
The previous hosting environment was holding the business back:
- Performance. Page load times on a thousand-SKU catalogue were unacceptable. Customers bounced before checkout.
- Scalability. No elastic capacity, so trade-show traffic peaks meant manual intervention or degraded performance.
- Availability. Single points of failure across the database, caching layer, and file storage. Any one of them taking the site down took the business down.
- Operational drag. The team was patching databases, managing search infrastructure, and babysitting message queues. None of that built product or grew the catalogue.
- Security exposure. No automated certificate management. Encryption applied inconsistently across services.
Building all of this in-house would have meant hiring AWS specialists. The customer wanted the architecture without the headcount.
The Solution
Logicata designed a multi-tier AWS-native architecture with managed services at every layer that could be managed:
Ingress and caching
Traffic arrives at Amazon Route 53, then through an Application Load Balancer with SSL terminated by AWS Certificate Manager (automatic renewal, no manual cert juggling). From there, Varnish cache servers serve full-page cache hits directly. Cache misses fall through to the application tier.
Application tier
Magento 2 runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group, fronted by NGINX and PHP. Amazon EFS provides shared storage for pub/media and pub/var so every instance sees the same media files without any synchronisation logic. Adding instances during a traffic spike is a metric threshold, not a deployment.
Managed data services
- Amazon Aurora MySQL for catalogue, orders, and configuration
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis for session storage and application cache
- Amazon OpenSearch Service for product search and filtering
- Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ) for asynchronous message processing
Every one of these is fully managed. No patching, no replication setup, no manual failover. The customer’s team stopped running database servers.
End-to-end encryption
ACM at the ALB, TLS on Redis, SSL on RabbitMQ, HTTPS on OpenSearch. Encryption applied consistently across every service, not just the front door.
Results
- Production-grade platform with high availability across every tier
- Multi-tier caching (Varnish plus Redis) significantly reduces page load times and database load
- Auto Scaling absorbs peak ordering periods without manual intervention
- Zero self-managed data infrastructure. Aurora, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, and Amazon MQ all fully managed
- Shared storage via EFS eliminates file sync complexity for multi-instance deployments
- Consistent encryption across ingress, application, and data tiers
- Headroom built in. Read replicas, additional Availability Zones, and OpenSearch cluster scaling all available without re-architecture
AWS Services Used
- Elastic Load Balancing (Application Load Balancer)
- Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling
- Amazon EFS
- Amazon Aurora MySQL
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Amazon MQ (RabbitMQ)
- AWS Certificate Manager
- Amazon Route 53
- Amazon VPC
About Logicata
Logicata is an AWS Advanced Partner holding the AWS Cloud Operations Management Competency, validated through an independent third-party audit. Logicata helps organisations build and operate secure, well-governed cloud platforms on AWS, enabling customers to reduce operational risk, meet assurance expectations, and scale with confidence.
