To successfully build a marketplace platform, it is crucial to have a strong and reliable infrastructure that can effectively handle the complexities of online transactions and user interactions. This is where AWS technologies come into play.
Amazon Web Services has solidified its position as the leading choice for businesses seeking to build and expand their marketplace platforms. Its cloud computing capabilities are unmatched in the cloud market but are often put in comparison with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Yet, it cannot be denied that AWS' most popular services give you everything you need to succeed.
The logical question arises “Could we use AWS for a small business though?” Not every business wants to build a huge app with AWS technologies. Let’s try to set up AWS services for the basic marketplace and see what can be optimized.
AWS Benefits for a Basic Marketplace
I won’t be listing all the already known advantages of Amazon Web Services. That’s already a given that the cloud market is leaning hard on AWS' most popular services. I want to stress the AWS benefits for marketplaces.
AWS technologies are flexible, and you can go away with less spending as long as you know your business needs. Storage costs are the most glooming ones, but with the right instances and experienced DevOps engineers, they’re manageable.
Hosting apps in the AWS cloud services means they are secured by the provider, and there are backups all around massive infrastructure around the world. Also, hosting on AWS keeps most services in one place and helps the development team be quick and effective.
Understanding the Basics of AWS Services for a Marketplace
When setting up a marketplace platform, you'll likely use a combination of AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (
These services provide the foundation for hosting your platform, storing data, managing databases, and handling messaging between different components of your application.
AWS for small businesses needs to choose services and configurations wisely. AWS' most popular services have free tiers and have set default parameters.
Checklist of AWS' Most Popular Services
Here’s the list of the cloud services we use on most development projects. I would say they are the essentials among Amazon Web Services.
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Amazon EC2: Provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
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Amazon S3: Offers highly scalable object storage for storing and retrieving any amount of data.
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Amazon RDS: Simplifies the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database.
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Amazon SQS: Enables distributed applications to communicate via message queues.
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Amazon CloudFront: Delivers content to end-users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.
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Amazon Elastic Load Balancing: Automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets.
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AWS IAM: Manages user access and permissions to AWS resources.
By leveraging the power and flexibility of AWS technologies, you can build scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solutions that meet your specific requirements. Now, on to the actual steps of how to set up AWS services.
Step-by-Step Guide for AWS Setup:
Amazon Web Service setup isn’t too complex in theory but different during development and going to production. Make sure you have an experienced team to avoid getting costly surprises.
How it goes from the very beginning:
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Create a
VPC network and overall network infrastructure. Network security and network traffic are important for data-intensive apps. The detailed guides on Amazon Web Services are actually helpful. -
Create an AWS account. It sounds scary but it doesn’t require too much information.
AWS installation insights might help with the detailed screenshots of the wide variety of services we talked about. -
Choose a domain name. You can use Route 53 to perform 3 main functions in any combination: domain registration, DNS routing, and health checking.
Here, we want to buy a domain name first and get a certificate (for http, https). Ensure the name of the marketplace is unique and easy to remember.
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Set up backend services
EC2 or Lambda are the main choices here, but Lambda isn’t for basic apps.
ECS is also closer to serverless but more complex. Elastic Container Service allows flexibility for containerized apps and is highly adjustable.
- Create a database
- Research and add additional services for the backend
Here, you need to consider
- Set up a load balancer for handling many requests
This might not be essential from the very start but this service is vital during big sales and holiday offers on marketplaces. To have traffic evenly distributed and the website running use the load balancer.
S3 is the source for frontend files (e.g., images of products). The services let you store and retrieve any amount of data. Setting up and managing the S3 bucket is key to working with data in the application.
- Manage
Cloudfront distribution
Cloudfront is another service we might need especially when the geolocation of the marketplace grows. Here, we have a content delivery network (CDN) which helps define where you want content to be delivered from.
For example, when a user is in the UK, we want the content to be delivered from the AWS server in the UK. It’s less strain on the system and shorter response for the user. Also, the cash function needs to be turned on here.
- Deploy your application
You can use the Amazon Web Services CLI or the CodeDeploy console to deploy and then monitor the app.
- Maintain and support, hire DevOps, and optimize AWS technologies
Once the app has been deployed, it isn’t actually at the finish line. Monitoring, supporting, and updating is a long-time commitment in software development. The best case scenario is to have skilled DevOps engineers in-house or as a team extension to always spot issues.
In terms of cost efficiency,
Sum Up
Setting up AWS services for a basic marketplace platform requires careful consideration and planning. Amazon Web Services are flexible and reliable for software development, but they can be costly if not optimized right.
Any marketplace business would benefit from the platform hosted on AWS even with minimal services connected.
To set up AWS services, choose the team and technologies first and foremost. Many prefer AWS as a cloud provider for the ease of use which leaves more time to focus on your business needs.