From unreliable cloud costs to complete operational control
How Enliven Systems built a fault-tolerant, on-prem webshop infrastructure that delivers continuous high availability, seamless extensibility, and reduces cloud dependency and costs by 50% for long-term stability.
Problems
Severe scalability limitations in cloud-only e-commerce platforms
Avoiding the high ongoing costs and vendor lock-in models of SaaS e-commerce
Requirement for secure, enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native operation
Solution
We delivered a high-availability ecommerce platform built on Magento Open Source, combining the flexibility of a custom theme with an enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native architecture. Pre-warmed Pods ensured instant scalability during traffic surges, while proxy micro-services handled heavy background tasks without slowing down the customer journey. A Redis caching layer and Kibana-powered analytics provided fast storefront performance and deep operational visibility.
To support extensive catalogs and mission-critical transactions, we deployed a distributed MariaDB setup designed for consistency and resilience under peak load. Rolling upgrades were executed safely through GitOps-driven canary deployments, a forward-leaning approach that enabled frequent iteration with zero downtime.
Industry
2 months
Timeline
Location
Engagement model
Project management model
Increased checkout conversion by 14.8% through consistently low-latency storefront performance enabled by pre-warmed Pods and high-performance Redis caching.
Reduced total cost of ownership by 50.3% through a fully on-prem, open-source Magento architecture with no revenue-tied licensing fees.
New Enterprise-Grade Integrations
Reduced total cost of ownership Unlocked 3 new enterprise integration streams (ERP, PIM, CRM) thanks to Magento’s extensibility, creating new upsell and automation opportunities for the business.
“We approached Enliven Systems with the need for a fully custom, high-availability ecommerce platform. The team delivered far beyond our expectations. They architected an on-prem, Kubernetes-native solution that gives us total control over performance, security, and scalability from day one. Even under heavy peak loads, the storefront remains fast and stable, and the platform has proven far more flexible than any SaaS alternative we evaluated.”
- GDPR
- ISO 27001
Our solutions comply with GDPR and ISO 27001, trusted by clients across regulated industries.
Mastering safe canary deployments across an open-source micro-service ecosystem
Rolling out new webshop features without downtime required a highly controlled deployment strategy. Operating within a fully open-source stack, where each micro-service behaved differently and lacked uniform commercial support, made this significantly more complex.
We engineered a GitOps-driven canary deployment workflow capable of gradually shifting traffic across Magento services, proxy micro-services, and Kubernetes Pods. This approach ensured safe, incremental rollouts while maintaining complete platform stability, even during high-traffic periods.
Rapid adoption of multiple new open-source components within 3 weeks
The solution required tight integration of diverse OSS technologies, including Magento Open Source, distributed MariaDB, Redis caching, Kibana observability, and Kubernetes-native operational tooling. Achieving production-grade proficiency in so many components within just 3 weeks required accelerated technical discovery, rapid prototyping, and an intensive validation process.
By implementing standardized onboarding patterns and fast feedback loops, we were able to adopt, performance benchmark, and stabilize each component quickly, laying the foundation for a scalable, high-availability e-commerce platform built entirely on open-source flexibility.
Building a GitOps-native ecommerce deployment pipeline
To ensure safe, automated, and zero-downtime rollouts, we implemented canary deployments using Flux CD and Flagger. This setup allowed the platform to gradually shift traffic between old and new versions of services, automatically validate Pod health, and trigger rollback procedures when anomalies were detected.
Patch updates, micro-service revisions, and critical upgrades could be deployed continuously across the Kubernetes cluster without service interruption.
Enabling Magento for modern GitOps workflows
Magento was not initially designed for containerized or GitOps-driven workflows, so a key part of the implementation involved adapting the platform to operate seamlessly within a declarative Kubernetes environment. We modularized key Magento components, externalized stateful configurations, and introduced strict versioning of themes, modules, and deployment manifests.
This allowed Magento to behave like a cloud-native service, benefiting from automated reconciliation, predictable rollouts, and infrastructure-as-code practices across dev, staging, and production environments.
Embedding custom analytics to surpass SaaS limitations
By embedding a custom analytics engine directly into Magento, we enabled ARIMA-based demand forecasts, Newsvendor stock optimization, min-cost flow warehouse balancing, bandit-driven checkout tuning, and GBM-powered abandonment predictions, unlocking 35% of optimization capabilities that typical SaaS platforms cannot provide.
Some of the more than 15 technologies we use.
C++
MongoDB
Flux CD
Scala
Akka
Angular
The Enliven Systems advantage
Enliven Systems helps ambitious companies turn data into a competitive advantage through cutting-edge AI engineering, research, and cloud optimization.
Distinguished talent pool
Predictable delivery
Experienced researchers
Success in a broad spectrum of applications
Take the first step to transform your data into intelligence that drives impact:
- Increase checkout conversion by 14.8%
- Cut the total cost of ownership by 50.3%
- Achieve 99.992% uptime with resilient Kubernetes operations
