Fashion retail at scale: To block or not to block

Jesus Manuel Pieiro gives you a glimpse into the challenges Inditex overcame in the transition of the ecommerce platform from monolithic to a microservices environment, oriented toward using event-driven nonblocking I/O technologies like Node.js. Jesus highlights the architectural decisions, technology, and tools that allowed the company to leverage the commercial growth in the years to come.

The fashion retail market is a multi-billion-dollar industry where the penetration of the online markets and the growth of the economies on the west side of the world play key roles. Internal revenues from online sales grow at a steady rate of approximately 25% interannually and increase each year, so we need to be prepared for growth. Providing an online solution that supports the actual traffic and demands of the market is a necessity, but the real challenge is designing a solution from the ground up and empowering the development teams with a suite of the most modern technologies without losing focus on the three main principles of scalability, flexibility, and security. This suite of technologies raises some concerns about leveraging them, knowing which use cases are best for each one, and empowering a technology to better suit the company’s needs. Jesus Manuel Piñeiro explores the architecture, technology, and tools that enabled Inditex to use Node.js as an event-driven nonblocking I/O technology inside its microservices platform product stack. Event-driven nonblocking I/O used in the right scenarios can empower growth projections, scale future traffic without a hassle, maintain high levels of security for customers, and allow development teams agility to solve product needs and new functionalities faster.