Flipkart Marketplace Platform  ·  View 02 of 25  ·  1 · Context and scope

High-Level Architecture

The shape of the platform in one picture, for the reader who will see only one.

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Edge Front Door + WAF Azure Front Door Media and CDN Blob + imgproxy Bot and rate limit Envoy + Redis Entry Customer BFF Envoy Gateway Seller and partner API API Management Identity Keycloak OIDC Discovery Catalog Cosmos DB NoSQL Search OpenSearch Recommendations KServe Pricing and offers Redis + rules Commerce Cart and checkout Java 21 Inventory Redis + Citus Order Citus shards Payments PCI enclave Backbone Event backbone Kafka / Strimzi Stream processing Flink Saga orchestration Temporal Fulfilment Fulfilment engine OR-Tools Logistics and last mile Notification fan-out workers Data and ML Lakehouse Iceberg on ADLS ML platform MLflow + KServe Trust and fraud Flink + models raw events index updates models High-Level Architecture — Edge to Data Platform Interface / broker Security / platform Application we own Queue / topic Data store event / async batch Read paths are cached at every hop; only inventory, payment and order state are read through to their systems of record. v 1.0 · owner Enterprise Architecture · date 2026-09

Decisions

  • Domain-oriented services on one AKS fleet, not a monolith and not 4,000 microservices
  • Read paths are cached at every hop; only inventory, payment and order state are read through to their system of record
  • Cross-domain communication is event-first — a synchronous call is allowed only when the caller genuinely cannot continue without an answer

Targets

  • 99.99% on the customer-facing critical path, 99.9% on seller and analytics surfaces
  • p95: search 300 ms, product page 300 ms, cart 200 ms, checkout 500 ms
  • Payment confirmation within a few seconds, bounded by the rail rather than by us

Deliberately omitted

  • Every store and topic — see acts 3 and 4
  • Failure paths — see the order lifecycle and the degradation matrix
  • Ads and monetisation, which ride the same discovery surfaces but are a separate architecture
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Open source on Microsoft Azure · Enterprise Architecture · 2026-0902-high-level-architecture