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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Unified Commerce on AWS

Overview

This Guidance uses the MACH principles of Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless applications to seamlessly integrate multiple systems on AWS. Unified Commerce encompasses all customer-facing touch-points to deliver a unified experience regardless of channel and breaks down the silos of a multi-channel approach. By deploying this Guidance, you can put marketing and operations together to improve your customer satisfaction with a coherent brand engagement that will increase advocacy.

How it works

This architecture diagram shows the seamless integration of multiple systems to provide a personalized and consistent retail experience to customers—regardless of the touchpoint or fulfillment method—by using AWS services for different layers and to orchestrate between multiple applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

The proposed architecture is capable of running at scale as it leverages managed services where possible. The traditional COTS applications would leverage Amazon EC2 instance metrics with Amazon CloudWatch alarms and logs. Auto Scaling groups and managed Amazon RDS can recover from failure.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

The architecture uses managed services where possible, so a large portion of security responsibility falls to AWS, following best practices of security including Amazon S3 encrypted data, IAM roles scoped down, and Amazon DynamoDB encryption at rest. Strong identity is enforced for Consumers through Amazon Cognito, and for operators through IAM roles. CloudWatch Logs and AWS CloudTrail provide traceability, and can be used with organization-wide capabilities, such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and a central SIEM.

Read the Security whitepaper 

Using managed services, reliability is achieved by default. Redundancy in storage on Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, scaling of Amazon SageMaker instances, Amazon Redshift, Athena, Amazon SageMaker Canvas, Amazon Pinpoint, Amazon Personalize, AWS AppSync, and EventBridge are also highly available by design. In case of any issues, the data can be replayed from raw events on Amazon S3 using the same pipeline. Events can also be replayed by using the EventBridge archive and reply functionality. The container architecture scales horizontally on a choice of either Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) running on AWS Fargate and dynamically adapts to capacity demands.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

Scaling is based on the use of AWS Serverless services like AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SageMaker endpoints, and Amazon Redshift, where possible.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

The use of managed and serverless services ensures the minimum cost for the architecture, because they’re designed to charge only when in use.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

The proposed architecture uses managed and serverless services where possible to have a sustainable approach, only running when needed. The AWS customer carbon footprint tool can be used to obtain total impact figures.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.