Magento shop software was not originally designed to run in the cloud. But with Rovio’s new Angry Birds webshop, open source system house AOE media has proven that it can be done.

At shop.angrybirds.com, fans of the smartphone app of the same name can order merchandise like stuffed animals or the PC version of the popular game. AOE media recently developed the online store using Magento Enterprise, and posted it to the Amazon cloud. As visitor numbers grow, Amazon loops in additionally servers fully automatically, which are then ready to take orders in just a few minutes.

New games like “Angry Birds Space” show the benefit of cloud hosting. Rovio had announced the space version of the game long in advance, so on the day it launched the shop had over a million unique visitors. Up to 5000 visitors looked around or made purchases in the shop simultaneously, without problems.  

Rovio’s colourful birds are enjoying growing popularity. The app had 700 million downloads through February 2012, and on some days thousands of licenses for the PC version are sold at the virtual shop counter.