AWS infrastructure that holds up at Black Friday — and shrinks the rest of the year.
Retail workloads on AWS swing harder than almost any industry: 50x traffic spikes during peaks, real-money checkout reliability, omnichannel inventory consistency, and a bill that should scale down on a Tuesday. We architect retail systems that absorb the spikes without overprovisioning for the trough.
The retail-on-AWS reality
- Peak-to-trough ratios of 50:1 mean elasticity isn't optional — and isn't free
- Checkout has to be the most reliable code path in your stack — every retry is real money
- Omnichannel inventory needs strong consistency across stores, warehouses, and channels
- Search, browse, and recommendations are where conversion lives — latency budgets matter
- PCI-DSS scope creeps if you don't actively reduce it — tokenization, hosted fields, and isolation
- The catalog is the read pattern; the cart is the write pattern. They need different architectures.
Peak isn't a future problem
If your infrastructure can't be load-tested at 5x current peak with a single command, you're going to find out the hard way during the next sale. We build game-day rehearsals into the release process.
DynamoDB on-demand for unpredictable traffic. ElastiCache for the catalog read path. SQS for order processing — never synchronous.
Where we plug in
Storefronts, checkout, and OMS
Headless commerce backends, checkout pipelines, order management, and recommendation engines. The full purchase funnel on AWS — with the peak-load story figured out before peak hits.
D2C and brand operations
Brand storefronts, subscription platforms, customer data platforms, and supply chain visibility. Where the SKU count is high, the catalog churns, and inventory truth lives in many systems.
Meal-kit, grocery, and subscription
Recurring billing platforms, route optimization for last-mile, cold-chain telemetry, and fulfillment center systems. The hardest part is consistency between order time and fulfillment time.
Booking, pricing, and loyalty
Booking platforms, dynamic pricing engines, GDS integrations, and loyalty programs. High read fan-out, complex availability calculations, and a 99.99% expectation from customers and partners.
The retail stack we build with
- CloudFront + Lambda@Edge for cached catalog, edge personalization, and bot mitigation
- DynamoDB on-demand + DynamoDB Streams for unpredictable read/write and CDC out of the cart
- OpenSearch + Personalize for product search, faceted filtering, and recommendation
- SQS + EventBridge + Step Functions for asynchronous order processing and fulfillment workflows
- Aurora + RDS Proxy for transactional data with connection pool resilience under spike
- WAF + Shield Advanced + Bot Control to keep card-testing, scraping, and DDoS off your checkout
Solutions that map to retail work
AWS Modernization
Monolith ecommerce platforms onto event-driven, autoscaling AWS-native architecture. The lift that makes peak survivable without overprovisioning.
Cost Optimization & FinOps
Retail bills are full of overprovisioned trough capacity. We right-size and commit so the bill matches the demand curve.
DevOps & CI/CD
Code freezes during peak shouldn't last for weeks. We build pipelines and release strategies that let retail teams ship safely through the holiday season.
Make peak boring.
Black Friday should be the day nothing happens because everything was built to handle it. We get retail systems there.
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