Conquering Peak Retail Events with AWS

Many retail customers depend on successful peak events to drive significant revenue. Peak events include promotional sales days like Amazon Prime Day, holiday sales, and the globally recognized Black Friday-Cyber Monday period. According to the National Retail Federation, in 2023, a record 200.4 million consumers shopped over the five-day holiday weekend from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. These high consumer traffic days drive massive revenue opportunities, but they also put immense pressure on technology systems and the teams that support them. A single impairment or performance issue can lead to missed sales, frustrated customers, and long-lasting damage to brand reputation.

Retail success starts with preparedness

Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies thrive on AWS by maintaining an “always ready” system reliability approach. Many organizations prioritize reliability and establish dedicated teams with clear decision-making frameworks and guiding principles. Through regular resilience testing, they detect software defects, scalability limitations, and infrastructure issues before production deployment negatively impacts customers. This systematic approach helps them manage high-traffic periods effectively.

The challenge of peak readiness

Retailers must forecast demand accurately and ensure their applications can scale seamlessly to handle increased traffic and transaction volumes. Peak seasons also introduce additional attack vectors in the form of BOTs and fraudulent activity that requires quick identification and mitigation. It’s important to maintain operational excellence throughout these periods. This requires a resilient technology stack comprising e-commerce platforms, inventory management systems, supply chain solutions and more, in addition to mechanisms to continually test, improve and remediate potential risks.

At AWS, we’re helping our customers achieve operational excellence, which in retail means having a high degree of reliability—able to withstand consumer demands on any given day.

Cloud modernization

Customers typically begin with lift-and-shift migrations to AWS before modernizing to leverage cloud-native features, as discussed in Modernize Your Applications, Drive Growth and Reduce TCO. By transforming monolithic applications into microservices, organizations create natural fault isolation boundaries and enable independent team operations. This architectural shift builds a composable commerce framework where services independently manage their data and failures, improving system resilience. With this approach, when one service fails, others remain operational. Teams can deploy, scale, and recover services independently, reducing recovery times and limiting failure impacts.

For retailers, this approach enables focus on critical customer journeys. Using graceful degradation techniques, essential functions like browsing, cart management, and checkout remain available during partial outages, minimizing business impact. Having a customer-centric design helps prioritize which services require higher resilience levels.

One example, discussed in Accelerating time to value with composable commerce solutions and accelerators in AWS Marketplace, is a microservices architecture that separates monolithic applications into independent, loosely coupled services. This foundation lets businesses select and combine best-fit components for each function, replacing or upgrading individual services without disrupting the entire platform. The resulting flexibility eliminates vendor lock-in and enables rapid innovation while maintaining system stability through isolated failures and independent scaling.

AWS recommendations for preparedness

The following recommendations can help guide you in designing, implementing, assessing, managing, and preventing service interruptions of your mission-critical workloads:

Modernization: Modernizing to a microservices architecture transforms monolithic applications into independent, loosely coupled services that enable fault isolation and team autonomy. This modernization creates a composable commerce framework where services can be independently scaled and managed, ensuring critical customer journeys remain operational during failures through graceful degradation, while enabling rapid innovation and eliminating vendor lock-in.
Single threaded ownership: Establish an owner to drive daily improvements, own the Correction of Error process (see Creating a correction of errors document for details), and provide oversight for major incidents. The owner should be supported by a site reliability engineering team focused on ensuring the resilience and reliability of your critical workloads or service teams that inherently own the entire workload.
Always ready: Peak preparation is an ongoing endeavor, not a one-time event. It is a daily activity that cultivates an “always on, always available” mindset in your organization. The rise of remote teams and complex distributed applications has increased the need for frequent software releases. Organizations and their applications must heighten their resilience to withstand this ever-evolving landscape.
Monitoring and observability: The primary purpose of observability is to enable you to detect and investigate problems. It also allows you to define and measure key performance indicators (KPIs), like order volume, cart and checkout success metrics, and service level objectives (SLOs), such as uptime. For most organizations, critical operations KPIs include mean time to detect (MTTD) an incident and mean time to recover (MTTR).
Performance testing: Understanding how your system will perform under increased load and stress is crucial, which makes performance testing a necessity. Load testing, a component of performance testing, simulates multiple users or transactions to measure the system’s response time, throughput, and resource utilization—ultimately determining its maximum operating capacity.
Capacity management: Ensure you have sufficient compute and storage capacity to meet your forecasted demand. A workload should not be limited to a specific instance family and size. AWS is responsible for the resiliency of the cloud infrastructure, but it’s the customer’s responsibility to ensure resiliency within the cloud environment for their applications and workloads.
Failure scenarios: Anticipate failures, whether first-party or third-party. Implement graceful degradation to transform applicable hard dependencies into soft dependencies. Some retailers employ Chaos engineering, which is an approach to software testing that involves intentionally introducing controlled disruptions or failures into your system. This is done to evaluate its resilience, identify potential vulnerabilities, and ensure that it can gracefully handle unexpected events—improving its overall reliability and availability.
Disaster recovery: Define your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Test your disaster recovery strategy quarterly for critical workloads and annually for others, especially after infrastructure changes. Verify runbooks, automations, and ensure personnel are identified, trained, and available. Use game days to simulate failures and AWS Resilience Hub to evaluate resilience. Document results to improve recovery strategies.
Event simulation: Gamedays and tabletop exercises are a few of the ways you can test the resiliency of your critical workloads. Quite often, technical teams think about high availability, disaster recovery, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). However, these alone are not sufficient to prepare an organization for the unexpected. Simulated events test not only the resiliency of applications but also your team’s preparedness to make decisions and respond accordingly.
Continuous resilience: Implement DevOps practices like CI/CD to streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying small frequent code changes—enabling rapid software updates. Proper testing, observability, and fault injections provide you with valuable operational insights that make it possible to mitigate potential disruptions before they happen.
Continuous improvement: Post-event retrospectives and a Correction of Errors process help your team understand root causes, review them consistently, and address them correctly in a blameless setting. These activities involve identifying the issue, its impact and root cause, supporting data, implications for critical pillars like security and operational excellence, lessons learned, and corrective actions.

AWS solutions for peak readiness

Preparing for peak events, whether promotions, new product launches, viral customer responses, or the holidays, can be daunting. AWS offers a wide range of reference architectures, guiding principles, best practices, tools, and supported programs to help you navigate these high-traffic periods seamlessly. While there are many available resources, here are a few highlights:

AWS Well-Architected Framework: A set of principles and best practices developed by AWS to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. This framework provides guidance across six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. By following the Well-Architected Framework, you can ensure that your cloud-based systems are designed and operated in alignment with AWS best practices. This will enable you to achieve your business objectives while maximizing the benefits of the cloud.
AWS Resilience Hub: A central place for you to define, validate, and track the resiliency of your AWS applications. It enables you to define your resilience goals, assess your resilience posture against those goals, and implement recommendations for improvement based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. AWS Resilience Hub provides a resiliency score representing the resiliency posture of the application that can be used to monitor and track progress over time.
AWS Countdown: Can help you throughout your planning to assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and plan capacity using proven playbooks developed by AWS experts. The Premium tier provides critical support across all phases of your cloud project, from design to post-launch retrospectives. It offers designated engineers, selected from a team of AWS experts, who provide proactive guidance and troubleshooting. These engineers get involved from project inception to ensure continuity, provide access to subject matter experts, and leverage support tools for faster issue resolution.
AWS Incident Detection and Response: A service for eligible AWS Enterprise Support customers that offers 24/7 incident management and proactive monitoring. The service aims to reduce the potential for failure and speed up recovery from disruptions to critical workloads.
AWS Migration and Acceleration Program: The AWS MAP program helps enterprises accelerate cloud migration using proven methodologies from thousands of successful customer migrations. The program combines automated tools, tailored training, APN (AWS Partner Network) expertise, and AWS investment through a three-phase framework: Assess, Mobilize, then Migrate and Modernize. MAP helps organizations build strong cloud foundations while reducing risk and initial migration costs, enabling them to leverage the cloud’s performance, security, and reliability benefits.

This is only a short list of services that may be available. Your AWS account team can provide you with a more comprehensive list of programs and services.

Order what you need anytime, anywhere

By following AWS recommendations and leveraging available AWS solutions, retailers can build resilient systems that can withstand the challenges of peak events, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and drive revenue growth. Moreover, fostering a culture of operational excellence and reliability within the organization and empowering teams with the right tools, processes, and mindsets can help minimize human errors and enable rapid incident response when issues arise.

Peak readiness is a perpetual process. Retailers must continuously monitor, test, and improve their systems to stay ahead of evolving customer demands and technological trends. Regular performance testing, capacity planning, and disaster recovery exercises should be routine practices to ensure systems are always ready to handle unexpected surges or disruptions.

Figure 1—Resilience Lifecycle Framework

Based on years of working with customers and internal teams, AWS has developed a resilience lifecycle framework that captures resilience learnings and best practices. The framework outlines five key stages (Figure 1). The stages include setting objectives, design and implementation, evaluation and testing, operations, and responding and learning. At each stage you can use strategies, services, and mechanisms to improve your resilience posture.

AWS customers consistently succeed during peak sales seasons through a resilience-focused approach. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team implements several key practices to maintain readiness, including regular GameDay exercises to simulate high-stress scenarios, War Room coordination during critical events, and a blameless Correction of Errors (COE) process that incorporates Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for incident investigation. These practices help teams quickly identify scaling issues, observability gaps, and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) shortfalls. This proactive approach to system reliability delivers two key benefits: immediate performance during peak events and long-term competitive advantage. Companies that maintain consistent service during high-traffic periods typically see increased brand loyalty and customer retention, leading to sustained revenue growth.

Conclusion

Peak retail periods – from Black Friday to holiday shopping to major promotional events – place extraordinary demands on retail operations. These high-volume periods stress every system, from digital platforms to supply chains. While these events offer significant revenue potential, they also test the limits of retail infrastructure. Success requires building robust, flexible systems that can reliably serve customers across all channels and touchpoints, no matter the demand level.

By following proven recommendations from AWS, and leveraging their Well-Architected Framework, retailers can build robust, highly scalable systems capable of handling even the highest traffic surges seamlessly. Fostering a culture of continuous resilience improvement through practices like chaos engineering and a correction of errors mechanism is key. With the right resilience-focused practices, framework guidance, and AWS resilience services in place, retailers can deliver flawless customer experiences during peak periods, driving brand loyalty, customer retention, and revenue growth.

Contact an AWS Representative to learn how we can help accelerate your business.

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