‍A Clear View into VELOX’s Technical Evolution and Use Cases

On May 8, 2025, Sly AG welcomed partners and contributors to the VELOX Community Event in Zürich. The event focused on the latest advancements of VELOX, the open-source headless eCommerce foundation, highlighting its flexibility, integration capabilities, and success in real-world applications.

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Why VELOX?

René opened the session by outlining the motivation behind building VELOX. He told us about his experience of years of experience customizing rigid standard eCommerce platforms like Hybris and Magento showed that tailoring these systems became costly and unsustainable over time. VELOX was introduced as a foundation—not a product or a platform—that prioritizes modularity, flexibility, and open integration.

With an MIT license, VELOX enables organizations to build custom eCommerce architectures efficiently without being locked into proprietary solutions. Its API-first, microservices-based approach allows for gradual, non-disruptive migrations and tailor-made builds.

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Feature Updates

The VELOX team introduced a host of new features:

• B2B Customer Support, including flexible customer hierarchies.
• BOB Journey and Branch Ordering, enabling customer impersonation and cross-organization ordering.
• Wishlist and Enhanced My Account with order history, password changes, and company data editing.
• OpenSearch Integration for multilingual, synonym-supported, and flag-based product search with custom analyzers.

These features complete the essential toolkit for B2C and B2B commerce projects built with VELOX.

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Infrastructure and Hosting Enhancements

The team announced significant infrastructure improvements, particularly on AWS:

• Fully automated deployment using Terraform and Kubernetes (EKS)
• CloudFront, WAF, and SSL/DNS management for performance and security
• CloudWatch Alerts integrated into Slack for real-time error and deployment monitoring
• Auto-scaling with Karpenter and pod horizontal scaling for traffic spikes

VELOX also continues to support Azure-based hosting with Bicep IaC scripts.

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Client Success Stories

The presentation highlighted three real-world VELOX deployments:

• Sonepar: Delivery control and review services hosted on Azure, integrated with logistics and BI systems.
• Bity: Cryptocurrency-based project using a simplified, Gradle multi-module version of VELOX to meet tight deadlines. Deployed by Bity’s DevOps team.
• NYFFOX: A full eCommerce solution combining VELOX with Storyblok CMS, iFAS ERP, Postmark, and myContent PIM. Hosted on AWS and developed collaboratively with TecHUB members.

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Technology Stack Upgrades

VELOX introduced several important backend and DevSecOps updates:

• Migration to Java 21 and Gradle 8, with centralized version management
• Clear modularization: separate DTO, client, and service layers per module
• New metadata support for dynamic attributes in carts and orders
• Integration of Renovate for automated dependency updates via GitLab CI

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Outlook

Looking ahead, the roadmap includes:

• Integration with Datatrans for payments
• Facet Search / Filter Navigation
• Planned Magnolia CMS integration
• On-prem Kubernetes deployments
• Enhanced ERP connectivity for synchronous price and order handling

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Conclusion

The VELOX Community Event showcased the maturity of VELOX as a modern, developer-first foundation for eCommerce. Attendees gained insights into its expanding feature set, real-world applications, and the technical innovations powering its evolution.

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VELOX remains committed to helping companies reduce total cost of ownership, avoid platform lock-in, and build future-ready digital commerce experiences.

See you at our next community event!