Cloud-Native Application Development Patterns for E-Commerce Scalability in Nigeria

Nigerian e-commerce platforms face acute scalability challenges during high-traffic events such as Black Friday sales and Ramadan promotions, often resulting in outages that erode customer trust and revenue. This study investigates cloud-native application development patterns and their impact on e-commerce platform scalability in the Nigerian context, addressing a gap between cloud-native design theory and localised implementation evidence. A design science approach is used to develop, implement, and evaluate a cloud-native architecture for a prototype Nigerian e-commerce platform, incorporating microservices, containerisation via Docker and Kubernetes, and serverless functions on AWS Lambda. The prototype is benchmarked against a monolithic baseline using load testing with Locust, simulating traffic profiles modelled on documented Nigerian e-commerce peak events. Performance metrics include requests per second at breaking point, p99 response latency, and auto-scaling response time. The cloud-native architecture sustains 4.8 times more concurrent requests than the monolithic baseline before degradation, with p99 latency remaining below 800 milliseconds under peak load. Cost analysis demonstrates a 34 percent cost reduction during low-traffic periods due to serverless elastic scaling. Keywords: cloud-native, e-commerce, scalability, microservices, Nigeria