🛒 Scalable E-commerce Backend (Microservices Architecture)

A scalable, containerized backend system for an e-commerce platform, built using a microservices architecture. https://roadmap.sh/projects/scalable-ecommerce-platform/solutions?u=67074b79fb4be684dbd801db

🧠 Project Overview

This project is inspired by the Scalable E-Commerce Platform challenge from Roadmap.sh. It aims to demonstrate how to build a modular, scalable backend for an e-commerce application by splitting common features into independently deployed and managed services.

Each core functionality of a typical e-commerce platform is implemented as a separate microservice.

• Each microservice resides in its own directory.
• Each service has its own database, if needed.
• Services communicate over HTTP within a private Docker network.
• The API Gateway is exposed publicly for external requests.

🧱 Tech Stack

• Node.js
• Express.js
• MongoDB
• Cloudinary
• Docker
• Kafka
• Resend
• Zod
• Stripe

🔧 Microservices

This system includes the following services:

• User Service: Handles user registration and authentication using JWT tokens.
• Product Catalog Service: Manages product listings, categories, and inventory.
• Shopping Cart Service: Handles cart operations like adding/removing items and updating quantities.
• Order Service: Manages order processing, tracking, and order history.
• Payment Service: Integrates with Stripe to handle payment sessions and webhooks.
• Notification Service: Sends emails to users using Resend.
• API Gateway: Built with http-proxy-middleware, this gateway handles routing, authentication, and authorization logic.

🧼 Architecture

🔹 Clean Architecture

Each microservice follows the principles of Clean Architecture, separating concerns across layers such as domain, application, infrastructure, and presentation.

🔹 Event-Driven Architecture (Kafka)

Some services, such as Notification and Payment, communicate via event-driven patterns using Apache Kafka to decouple operations and improve scalability.

🚀 CI/CD

A GitHub Actions workflow is configured to automatically build and push Docker images to Docker Hub.

✅ Requirements

Before running the project, ensure the following:

• Docker is installed and running on your machine.

• You have valid Stripe API keys and have configured a webhook endpoint for payments.

• You have a Resend API keys for sending emails.

• You have a Cloudinary account, API keys, and a folder created to store product images.

• You’ve set up all required environment variables.

📝 To check the necessary environment variables, refer to the env.template files located in each service folder and the root project directory.

▶️ Running the Project

To start all services locally using Docker Compose:

docker compose up --build

This command will:

• Build all services
• Create containers
• Start the entire system

🔜 Next Steps

To take this project to the next level and run it in a production environment, consider the following deployment strategies and AWS services:

🚀 Deployment on AWS

• Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service)
• AWS Fargate
• Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
• Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka)
• CI/CD Pipelines/GitHub Actions
• Monitoring & Observability (CloudWatch, Grafana, or Prometheus )