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Retail and e-commerce using Azure Database for PostgreSQL

App Service
Database for PostgreSQL
HDInsight
Search
Storage

Solution ideas

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This article outlines an e-commerce solution that engages customers by using Azure Cognitive Search to provide customized products and offers. The solution uses Azure Database for PostgreSQL for secure, scalable storage of product and transactional data.

Architecture

Architecture diagram that shows an e-commerce system. Components include Azure App Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and storage services.

Dataflow

  1. The Web Apps feature of Azure App Service hosts a web application.
  2. Azure Database for PostgreSQL stores session state data and data about products.
  3. An Azure Storage account stores static content and product images.
  4. Azure Cognitive Search is used to search across all products.

Components

Scenario details

E-commerce customers discover products through searches. As a result, intelligent search engines that provide the following features are essential for e-commerce apps:

  • Relevant results
  • Near-instant results
  • Linguistic analysis
  • Geo-location matching
  • Autocomplete capabilities

This secure and scalable e-commerce solution uses Azure Cognitive Search to provide intelligent search results to customers. This cloud search service, which was formerly called Azure Search, offers infrastructure, APIs, and tools for building a rich search experience over private, heterogeneous content. When you use this platform as a service (PaaS) component, you can provide customized products and offers to your customers. You also don't have to run search queries inside your database, and you don't have to manage infrastructure or become a search expert.

The solution uses Storage to store unstructured data like images, videos, and documents. This service offers highly available, massively scalable, durable, and secure storage in the cloud. For transactional processing, the solution uses Azure Database for PostgreSQL. This fully managed relational database service offers dynamic scalability. Scaling capabilities of App Service also help ensure the solution responds to changing resource requirements.

Potential use cases

This solution is ideal for the retail industry.

Next steps

Product documentation:

Microsoft Training modules: