Deploying an Angular Store on commercetools

Deliver a sub-second Angular website on commercetools with Layer0

Angular is a frontend framework created by Google. It is a popular solution for large enterprise websites that plan to scale their site quickly. All in all, Angular offers great runtime performance and is fit to be the backbone for complex, revenue-generating websites with heavy traffic, such as eCommerce and Travel websites.

Angular comes with a bunch of built-in capabilities, including:

• Code generation: Angular generates code that's highly optimized for JavaScript virtual machines, providing the benefits of hand-written code. HTML templates combined with JavaScript open the door for optimizations that are simply not possible in other frameworks, for example React.
• Code splitting: Angular apps load quickly, delivering automatic code-splitting. This way, users load code required to render the view they request.
• Real DOM: Angular uses real DOM, making the framework best suited for websites that do not change frequently. However, the framework is not the best choice for large websites, or those that make frequent updates, such as most eCommerce sites.

commercetools is an API-first, microservice-backed, cloud-based eCommerce platform known to transform enterprise websites to a modern commerce architecture quickly. This is done by separating the frontend presentation from the backend functionality to allow for seamless shopping experiences across all digital touchpoints, as well as increase DevOps. The platform offers a proprietary frontend names SUNRISE Starter Project and a robust API available named commercetools API. The API has a catalogue of 300+ endpoint which allow the platform to offer a modular, customizable architecture. While commercetools offers some the best APls among the leading eCommerce platforms, it does not run JavaScript or AMP server-side. To their credit, however, the platform recognizes that Sunrise Starter framework is limited and support free open-source third-party frameworks as well.

Layer0 can take you Angular storefront on commercetools and bring it down to sub-seconds in a matter of hours. The average website on Layer0 see median speeds of 320ms loads, as measured by Largest Contentful Paint (a critical metric in Core Web Vitals). Layer0, however, is much more than a website accelerator. It's known as the Jamstack platform for eCommerce. Layer0 makes websites faster for end-users and simpler for frontend developers to maintain. The platform was built specifically for large-scale, database-driven websites such as eCommerce and Travel and brings following benefits: 

• Jamstack for eCommerce via pre and just-in-time rendering
• Zero latency networking via prefetching of data from your product catalog APIs
• An edge that can be configured natively within your Angular app (CDN-as-JavaScript)
• Edge rules that can run locally, in pre-prod and production environments  
• Automated, full-stack preview URLs from GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket with every new branch and push
• Performant split tests at the edge for A/B tests that do not slow down the site, canary deploys, and personalization
• Serverless JavaScript that is much easier and more reliable than AWS Lambda
  

On Layer0, your Angular commercetools store will run in sub-second speeds and your developers will be empowered to control edge caching and reduce rework using the multiple developer productivity tools that come with the platform. 

Browse around Shaper Image, a commercetools website delivering instant page loads on Layer0. "Everyone here has commented on how blazing fast our site is" -Mihaela Mazzenga, CTO at Sharper Image

If you're currently using Angular, use the this guide to deploy your Angular app on Layer0 and get sub-second loads in as soon as 1 hour of work.