AWS Well-Architected for Retail

When Retail Embraces AWS Well-Architected

The retail industry has a dynamic landscape and requires a robust IT infrastructure to handle increasing workloads. One of our clients, a leading retail company, had a vision to improve the performance of their IT infrastructure, to efficiently handle their many applications and increasing workloads, and they approached us for the same.

Our client is a prominent health food company, offering a wide range of organic food in their product line. With physical stores at multiple locations and an e-commerce website, our client had to handle huge demand and workload.

The Real Challenge

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Our client had their website and applications hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. As a retail business, our client’s concerns were inventory or stock management, handling higher demands in certain times of the day and the year, and security of business data, like stock or inventory data, customers’ data, sales reports etc.

Handling their huge workloads and reviewing the state of their workloads was the company’s biggest challenge. Moreover, their systems were inefficient and crashed under pressure. Unable to find where they were missing out, the company approached us to identify the loopholes in their IT infrastructure and take the necessary steps to improve it.

Solutions For A Long-term Impact

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As an AWS cloud consultant, we leveraged the AWS Well-Architected Tool to evaluate their IT architecture using AWS best practices. We used the tool to find out how well our client’s IT infrastructure was configured.

Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, we guided our client in making their workloads more secure, reliable, cost-effective, and efficient. We also provided recommendations for improving their workload based on best practices. These best practices have been set up by AWS Solutions Architects based on their vast experience in creating solutions for various businesses.

The AWS Well-Architected Tool we used is built around six pillars - sustainability, cost optimization, performance efficiency, reliability, security, and operational excellence. It offers a consistent approach for enterprises to review architectures and deploy scalable designs. Available free of cost in the AWS Management Console, the AWS Well-Architected Tool offers a mechanism to evaluate workloads regularly, identify high-risk issues as well as record improvements.

Moreover, the client had been using generic purpose instances, which were not optimized for high CPU applications and high memory. Our team monitored their systems for memory performance and occasional CPU spikes, and suggested that they use the most optimum instance for their CPU and memory requirement. We also analyzed their system and applications for possible vulnerabilities and threats, and implemented the right security architecture.

Besides using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, the AWS architectures we primarily used included elastic load balancing, S3, RDS, and EC2.

Outcomes

Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, our client received mature architectural guidance, as the tool provided them access to the latest architectural best practices used by AWS architects. Our client attained continuous improvement throughout the workload cycle, as the tool enables them to save point-in-time milestones and track changes made to their AWS cloud workload architecture.

A Well-Architected review of our client’s cloud infrastructure also helped them in the following ways:

Pressing issues with security, operations, reliability, performance, and cost got remediated quickly.
The company got help in interpreting the flow of new AWS services, and immediately addressing issues related to cost and operational excellence.

In a nutshell, using the tool, our client received valuable guidance to improve the efficiency of their IT infrastructure.

The Last Words

A retail company’s IT infrastructure is mostly under high pressure, which requires their systems to be highly efficient and secure. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helped us analyze our client’s workloads using a consistent process, identify and understand any potential risks in their AWS cloud architecture, and determine the next steps necessary for improvement. Overall, the project has been a challenge and a great learning experience.

Tapping Into the Potential of AWS Well-Architected for Retail