Live Ultimate

Live Ultimate overview

Live Ultimate sells food supplements and natural skincare to retail consumers. We engineered its e-commerce infrastructure and native mobile app ecosystem as containerised microservices, replacing a rigid legacy store with a decoupled system that processes a high-volume product catalogue, manages recurring subscription workflows and handles tokenised payment transactions for the supplement and skincare lines.

The scope ran from backend infrastructure design to the customer experience on web browsers and iOS and Android devices. Traffic enters through a global content delivery network, a web application firewall and an application load balancer, then splits between a public web interface container and a mobile API gateway container. Behind them, a private virtual network cluster hosts the catalogue engine, the authentication and account management service and the payment service, backed by a primary transactional PostgreSQL database and a distributed Redis cache. Analytics workloads and archival backups run separately on Azure, connected to the AWS environment over an encrypted private tunnel.

Challenge in Wellness operations

Before the rebuild, Live Ultimate ran on a single large application in which the database, frontend and inventory systems were tightly bound. A sudden spike on product browsing pages could slow down or crash checkout. Supplements and skincare also carry data the old system could not track cleanly: manufacturing batch numbers, strict shelf-life dates, stock levels that depend on ingredients, and multiple packaging sizes. Handling these required slow, custom database scripts that degraded response times across the site.

The business goal was zero-downtime selling. That meant separating the catalogue, the payment engine and the customer notification system into independent services, bringing product page loads down to milliseconds, automating the inventory pipeline, and building infrastructure that updates itself without interrupting active shoppers. The migration itself had to keep the old database online and in sync with the new environment without creating duplicate orders or dropping shopping carts.

Solution architecture & delivery

We migrated in four controlled steps. Automated extraction scripts pulled customer records, historical orders and product descriptions out of the legacy system into structured data models. A validation pipeline removed broken records, fixed formatting faults and re-verified user passwords with modern encryption before anything was written to the new store. Intelligent routing then shifted a small percentage of live traffic to the new platform while the majority stayed on the old one; once the new stack handled those users cleanly, the remaining traffic moved over. After a set monitoring period with zero errors, the legacy infrastructure was decommissioned.

The catalogue engine splits supplement data (ingredients, usage instructions, allergen warnings, regulatory disclaimers) and skincare data (skin types, volumes, application routines) into optimised relational tables in PostgreSQL, with an Elasticsearch index in front so filtering by price, benefit or type returns in real time and updates the moment an administrator edits a product. Pre-built product components for popular items are served from the Redis cache, so the database only handles critical transactions such as checking live inventory at checkout. A multi-attribute taxonomy resolves variant hierarchies, bottle sizes, single canisters and multi-pack bundles, calculating price, shipping weight and available stock at the moment an item is added to the cart, which removes purchases of temporarily out-of-stock items. Read-only PostgreSQL replicas absorb browsing queries while the primary node processes writes only.

The account service issues encrypted access tokens through Okta and OAuth 2.0, letting customers update addresses, review orders, check tracking numbers and adjust subscription schedules without resending credentials. A separate subscription state machine runs as a background worker: when a renewal date arrives it creates the order, charges the stored payment token and notifies the warehouse to ship, with no human intervention. The loyalty programme is event-driven; purchases, reviews and subscription milestones publish messages to a shared queue, and a background processor calculates reward balances without touching the checkout path. Card data is tokenised client-side by the payment processor, so no raw financial details are stored and PCI-DSS requirements are met by design.

The iOS and Android apps render native system controls rather than a wrapped web page, talk to a mobile-specific API gateway that trims payloads to save battery and data, and receive shipment, product-launch and subscription-delivery alerts through a push routing service that fans out to Apple Push Notification Service and Firebase Cloud Messaging. An anonymised analytics pipeline on Azure turns browsing habits into personalised home-screen recommendations served from a fast-access table. Product images pass through an automated pipeline that generates resized WebP and AVIF variants distributed by the CDN. Infrastructure is defined in Terraform, services run in Docker on Kubernetes with Horizontal Pod Autoscalers that add frontend replicas above 50% CPU and remove them below 20%, GitHub Actions builds and tests every commit before a zero-downtime rolling update, and Prometheus and Grafana monitor error rates, database connections and network performance. TLS 1.3, AES-256 storage encryption with rotated keys held in hardware security modules, AWS WAF and Shield, CrowdStrike runtime protection, GDPR deletion scripts and HIPAA-style separation of Wellness preferences from identity data complete the security and compliance layer.

Key features of Live Ultimate

• Product catalogue engine with PostgreSQL relational schemas, Elasticsearch indexing and Redis-served product components for supplements and skincare
• Multi-attribute variant taxonomy that prices, weighs and stock-checks bundles and pack sizes at add-to-cart time
• Customer account service with Okta/OAuth 2.0 tokens for addresses, order history, tracking numbers and subscription management
• Background subscription state machine that renews recurring orders, charges stored payment tokens and notifies the warehouse automatically
• Event-driven loyalty rewards processor fed by purchase, review and subscription-milestone events
• Native iOS and Android apps behind a mobile API gateway with push notifications via APNs and Firebase Cloud Messaging
• Personalised product recommendations from an anonymised analytics pipeline, plus automated WebP/AVIF image optimisation on a global CDN
• Client-side payment tokenisation, GDPR deletion automation and immutable audit logging

Who this e-commerce platform is for

This build suits consumer Wellness, supplement and skincare brands whose products carry batch, shelf-life and variant complexity and whose revenue depends on recurring deliveries. It fits retailers that need a storefront and native apps to keep selling through traffic spikes, promotional events and platform updates, and that must meet PCI-DSS, GDPR and health-data handling expectations.

Impact & results

• Legacy monolith replaced by independent catalogue, authentication, payment and notification services that scale and fail in isolation
• Migration completed with staged traffic shifting and the old system decommissioned after a monitoring period with zero errors
• Popular product pages served from memory cache in a fraction of a second, with the database reserved for inventory checks and transactions
• Subscription renewals create orders, take payment and notify the warehouse with no manual steps
• Raw card data never stored, satisfying PCI-DSS through processor tokenisation
• GDPR deletion requests wiped across databases, backups and marketing platforms within minutes; updates deployed mid-day with zero downtime via rolling Kubernetes releases

FAQ about Live Ultimate