Designing a Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Architecture for Nigerian E-Commerce Platforms

Nigerian e-commerce platforms experience significant performance degradation and outages during high-demand sales events, attributable to inadequate cloud infrastructure architecture that lacks autoscaling, load balancing, and disaster recovery provisions. This study designed a scalable cloud infrastructure architecture specifically tailored for the operational patterns and cost constraints of mid-tier Nigerian e-commerce platforms. A platform requirements analysis was conducted through structured interviews with engineering teams at three Nigerian e-commerce companies in Lagos, along with a review of publicly documented outage incidents. The architecture designed uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the deployment target, implementing a microservices decomposition of the monolithic platform common to Nigerian e-commerce applications. Key components include an Application Load Balancer, auto-scaling groups for stateless compute tiers, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments for database resilience, Amazon CloudFront CDN integration to reduce latency for users across all six geopolitical zones, and Elasticache Redis for session and cart caching. Infrastructure-as-code was defined using Terraform templates for reproducible environment deployment. Cost estimation using AWS Pricing Calculator showed a projected infrastructure cost reduction of 34 percent compared to over-provisioned static hosting, under typical load profiles. Disaster recovery objectives of RTO less than 30 minutes and RPO less than 5 minutes were demonstrated through simulated failover testing. The study recommends the framework as a reference architecture for Nigerian start-up e-commerce platforms and suggests evaluation of Azure and OCI alternatives for cost optimisation in the Nigerian cloud market.

Keywords: cloud architecture, e-commerce, AWS, scalability, Nigerian technology