Magento is cool and it has almost everything that you need for your online shops. But, many people complain about its speed, resource intensive, difficulty to maintain, etc. If you want to make your magento experience faster, you might need to burn more money for the server resources. But if you don’t want to do that, Vue Storefront might be an alternative.
“Vue Storefront is a headless and backend-agnostic eCommerce Progressive Web App (PWA) written in Vue.js” – quoted from their site. In theory, you can transform your magento to a PWA which should be able to perform like a native mobile app. So, if you want to make your Magento (especially, Magento 1) faster without spending too much money for the server upgrade, or; spending too much time upgrading to Magento 2, likely this is the answer.
We got a chance to help our major client to implement Vue Storefront to their existing Magento 1. The implementation is not that difficult and we’re on our way to make it happen. This article is gonna talk more about architectural implementations of it.
AWS has a good reference on how to implement Magento on its cloud service (see pict above). It’s pretty standard architecture for Magento, though: load balancer (with optional autoscaling group), and the load balancer has several availability zone with its own independent services (multiple web servers, one single database, and one redis instance).
However, when you look at Vue Storefront architecture, there’s not so much difference. Vue Storefront will still use Magento to get what it needs via Magento API, then store the information in its own data storage (in this case it can be Elasticsearch or Redis).
This way, Vue Storefront will be the first server behind your load balancer that will process requests from the website’s visitors. Then, it will check on its storage (which is a lot faster because it uses no SQL) of the information that it needs, and return it back to your visitors. If the information doesn’t exist, it will finally request that information via Magento API. Behind the scene, Vue Storefront also does something cool to grab store info such as products, carts, orders, and others via Magento API regularly and store it on its own fast data storage.
See that you will literally only need at least one additional server for Vue Storefront, one Elasticsearch, one Redis, and you are good to go!
In short, if you want to make your Magento 1 faster without spending too much time and money, Vue Storefront might be good for you. 😉
