This page gives a technical and architecture overview of the Infosys Equinox platform.

Software Architecture

Technical Overview

Infosys Equinox introduces MACH-X technology, designed to address your “X”—the unknown variable in the ever-evolving digital landscape. MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless, an industry-recognized framework.

Infosys Equinox is a microservices-based digital commerce platform that is both flexible and easily extensible. Key principles implemented by Infosys Equinox include:

Infosys Equinox - Technical Overview

Microservices-based Architecture

  • Infosys Equinox is built using the Microservices architecture style where the services are segregated by Sub-Domain (Domain Driven Design).
  • Loosely coupled as there is no API-based inter-service communication, but only asynchronous event-based communication between services avoiding the cyclic situation.
  • Uses and conforms to lightweight and standards REST protocols.
  • We can evolve each microservice as needed by the business. Also, we can deploy, scale-out, and manage each microservice independently.
  • Each microservice has its own persistence, caching, and administrative interfaces.

Cloud-Native

  • Infosys Equinox was born in the cloud and takes advantage of the Cloud’s power and flexibility.
  • Conforms and follows 12-factor App methodologies.
  • All the tools and the framework are selected/implemented accordingly to use Cloud Services (if available).

Cloud Agnostic

  • Infosys Equinox is designed and built to run in different Cloud Providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
  • Though Infosys Equinox is Cloud-Native and Cloud-Agnostic, we can still deploy in an On-Premise setup as well.
  • All tools and the framework are selected/implemented in a way that there is cloud-agnostic and has no IaaS vendor lock-in.

API Gateway/ Backend for Frontend

  • Infosys Equinox uses Apache Camel-based orchestration to orchestrate between various microservices to provide a single API to the Presentation Layer.
  • The Microservices define a low-level view (Close to CRUD) of the key capabilities of an e-commerce system. Orchestration stitches the low-level capabilities into a distinct digital experience
  • Infosys Equinox offers scalable StoreFront (user-facing) and administrative orchestration APIs so that the complexity and coordination burden with multiple services is not in the front end.

Architecture Overview

The layered architecture of Infosys Equinox Commerce consists of four standard layers: presentation, orchestration, microservices, and persistence.

Infosys Equinox - Architecture Overview

Presentation Layer

Infosys Equinox Commerce’s presentation layer is where the business administrators and storefront customers use to interact with the capabilities of Infosys Equinox Platform. This becomes the entry point into Infosys Equinox Commerce platform unless you are accessing the platform in a headless manner i.e., consuming the microservices/Orchestration APIs directly. Infosys Equinox Commerce’s presentation layer comprises of two components:

  • Admin Portal
  • Storefront

Admin Portal

  • Admin Portal is a set of administrative web interfaces which enables any business administrator/ User to manage master data which includes the following:
    • Businesses
    • Stores
    • Catalog information – Products and SKUs
    • Categories
    • Pricing
    • Promotions
    • Order
    • User
  • This layer controls the business user interaction with the Platform and each Business tool is an independently bootable application built using Spring Boot, Thymeleaf, and MD Bootstrap framework.
  • This layer forwards the request to the Admin Orchestration layer which in turn orchestrates it with the corresponding microservices.

Storefront

  • Infosys Equinox’s Commerce Storefront is a reference storefront that is used by the end-user to perform commerce transactions.
  • It is built using React Framework on NodeJS and supports reusable, atomic, and modular design patterns for rapid development that never interfere with backend code.
  • It has various features which you would expect in a Commerce storefront:
    • Browse and Navigation of Catalog information
    • Search with filter and sort
    • Wishlist
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • Orders
    • Profile
    • Accounts, Cost Centre, etc.
  • Infosys Equinox offers storefronts for both B2B and B2C models of business and they are used as an accelerator for any implementation.
  • This layer forwards the request to the Storefront Orchestration layer which in turn orchestrates it with the corresponding microservices.

Orchestration Layer

As the name indicates this layer is responsible for orchestrating different Microservices APIs and aggregates data to the Presentation Layer.

This layer in many ways acts as a API Gateway wherein it abstracts the underlying microservices distribution and provides a single consolidated API for the presentation layer to avoid the latency and/or the number of hops required to populate the page.

Also, there is no physical inter microservice communication through REST and all such interactions happen through this layer.

Infosys Equinox Commerce’s Orchestration Layer comprises of two components:

  • Admin Orchestration
  • Storefront Orchestration

Admin Orchestration

  • Built using Apache Camel and Spring Boot, this layer provides aggregated API for a business tooling page i.e. bridge between presentation and microservices layer.
  • The admin orchestration though it is represented as a single module, there is provision to deploy them per business tooling which includes common elements.
  • Some of the notification features reside in this layer since those features involve data to be retrieved from more than one microservices.

Storefront Orchestration

  • Same as the admin orchestration, Storefront Orchestration is built on top of Apache Camel and Spring Boot.
  • Similar to admin orchestration, this layer provides functionalities in form of APIs to the React Presentation Layer.

Orchestration PDP API – Illustration

The Product Details Page Orchestration API stitches data from the following services:

  • Product and SKU information – Catalog Services
  • Regular and Sale price – Price Services
  • Deals (if any) – Promotion Services
  • Category details – Merchandising Services
Infosys Equinox Orchestration PDP API Illustration

Note: The calls from Orchestration can be parallel or sequential depending on the use case.

After the Orchestration API stitching the data, the Product Details Page is rendered as follows:

Infosys Equinox Orchestration PDP API's Storefront View

 

Microservices Layer

This layer is the core component in the Infosys Equinox Commerce Platform providing business logic using microservices architecture style.

  • All APIs follow REST standards and principles providing CRUD operations on entities of the corresponding microservice.
  • Infosys Equinox Commerce microservices adopts decomposition by business capability pattern for the definition of microservices.
  • Infosys Equinox Commerce has two main flavors of microservices namely:
    • Non-transactional services
    • Transaction services
  • Following services fall under the Non-transactional services category:
    • Catalog
    • Merchandise
    • Price
    • Promotion
    • Search
    • Foundation
  • Following services fall under the Transaction services category:
    • Cart
    • User
    • Authorization
    • Shipping
    • Payment
    • Address
    • Tax
    • List
    • Orders
    • Subscriptions
    • Loyalty
  • There are certain microservices that are utilities in nature and they are as follows:
    • Notification
    • Feed

Persistence Layer

This layer is where the data or assets created by a business administrator and storefront user are persisted. Infosys Equinox Commerce has the following flavors of data store:

  • SQL Data Store – Infosys Equinox Commerce uses Hibernate with Spring Data JPA for SQL data store abstraction and  MySQL is used as the SQL Datastore.
  • NoSQL datastore – and Mongo the NoSQL data store.  and Spring Data MongoDB for Mongo abstraction.
  • Infosys Equinox Commerce uses Apache SOLR to index data from various services for providing search features to the storefront and in some cases the business tooling as well.
  • SOLR indexing of the data is through Pentaho jobs which fetch information from various microservices database and pushes them as documents into SOLR.
  • Infosys Equinox Commerce uses a content repository for storing assets which are through Apache JackRabbit (JCR) content repository abstraction.
  • Infosys Equinox Commerce uses Redis cache to store and fetch frequently used data rather than fetching it from the database.

 

Revision History
2022-04-10 | JP – Fixed link and http issues.
2022-01-12 | JP – Added the page and the content.