OrderCloud Platform Architecture
This post provides a high level overview of the key components of the OrderCloud platform and typical layers of an ecommerce solution built with OrderCloud.
Ecommerce Features
OrderCloud provides a complete set of core commerce functionality that is exposed through RESTful APIs:
- Product and Catalog management
- Buyer and Seller management
- Order management
- Order fulfillment
- Pomotions, pricing and payments
- Search
- User and user group management
The core functionality can be extended, augmented, and customised based on business needs using third party integrations facilitated by webhooks, middleware proxies and integration events.
The data model itself is also extensible, allowing you to extend it with a feature called Extended Properties (XP). Using XP, you can extend out of the box resources/entities with your own complex/nested JSON object.
Cloud Infrastructure
The OrderCloud platform is built on a robust multi-tenant cloud infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure providing:
- Security: OrderCloud is annually audited for SOC 2 Type 2 with HIPAA controls, is compliant with GDPR and CCPA, and facilitates PCI compliance for its platform and all solutions.
- Scalability, Availability and Performance: Globally distributed infrastructure with automatic scaling to provide high performance and gurantee high availability. Zero downtime deployments to with continuous delivery.
- Monitoring: 24x7 monitoring for performance, reliability and threat detection.
- Redundancy: Geo-redundant backup of all resources and services.
Developer Tools
OrderCloud also provides a very rich set of developer tools including:
- OrderCloud portal that contains among other things, an interactive API console to interact with the API in a user-friendly interface
- Client side (JavaScript) and server side (.NET C#) SDKs
- Open source .NET core based middleware foundation library
- Open source implementation of Buyer and Admin apps written in Angular
Customer Experience
OrderCloud's headless API-first architecture enables you to develop tailored customer experiences based on how customers interact with your business. This may be:
- Responsive ecommerce websites
- Mobile applications
- Custom seller interfaces for B2B marketplaces
- Smart home devices
- IoT devices
- Social ecommerce
Key Takeaways from the Platform
Dev Friendly & Language Agnostic
OrderCloud enables developers to use the tech stack of their choice as a result of the headless nature of the solution exposing all functionality through RESTful APIs.
Composable Commerce
Allows teams to select best of breed solutions to meet unique business needs. OrderClould provides a modular, open standards based, flexible and business focused architecture.
Robust Authentication
OrderCloud’s authentication system is built on top of OAuth2. Additionally, OrderCloud supports OpenID Connect, an authorization standard built on top of OAuth2 for single-sign-on.
Extensible Platform
The OrderCloud API supports various options to extend the platforming including Webhooks, Middleware Proxies, and Integration Events which we will explore in more details in a dedicated post on integrations.
Hopefully, that gives you a good understanding of the OrderCloud platform architecture and its key components. Stay tuned for future posts where I will delve into each area highlighted above in more detail.