Resilience in Retail

In the modern retail landscape, the customer experience is paramount. Retailers are always looking for new ways to improve the customer journey, from personalized recommendations to frictionless checkout experiences. As a result, retailers are increasingly relying on technology to meet the demands of their customers.

However, with the increasing reliance on technology comes the risk of downtime and disruptions. A single point of failure can bring down an entire system, causing lost sales and damaged reputations. To mitigate these risks, retailers need to build resilience into their technology infrastructure and should consider potential impacts if any of the infrastructure encounter issues.

Quote from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com

Moving workloads to the cloud does not automatically mean your workloads are resilient. Let’s look at how retailers can adopt a cloud-native approach to achieve true cloud resilience. We’ll also look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Resilience Hub, a service that helps you manage and monitor your cloud resources to ensure they are configured correctly and meet your resilience goals. Then finally, we will discuss how Trusted Advisor can help you monitor your ongoing cloud resource configuration and ensure that your resources are always optimised for resilience.

Why Moving Workloads to the Cloud Does Not Mean Automatic Resilience

Moving workloads to the cloud can provide many benefits, including cost savings, scalability, and flexibility. However, simply moving workloads to the cloud does not guarantee resilience. Businesses risk disruption and even downtime of their mission critical systems without correct planning and configuration before moving workloads to the cloud.

One of the considerations when moving to the cloud is the resilience shared responsibility model. The shared responsibility model clearly defines the aspects that require customer oversight when operating in AWS.

Shared responsibility model for resilience

With the AWS Cloud, AWS are responsible for the resilience of the cloud, while the customer is responsible for the resilience of their data and applications in the cloud. This means that retailers need to take proactive steps to ensure that their workloads are designed to be resilient using all of the tools and services available to them.

Adopt a Cloud-Native Approach for True Cloud Resilience

Another consideration is the dynamic nature of the cloud. The cloud is constantly changing, with new services and features being released regularly. This can make it difficult for retailers to keep up with the latest best practices and ensure that their workloads are configured correctly.

To achieve the resilience your business requires, retailers need to adopt a cloud-native approach to their technology infrastructure. Cloud-native refers to the design and development of applications that are built specifically for the cloud. Cloud-native applications are designed to be highly scalable, flexible, and resilient.

To build a cloud-native application, retailers need to start with the cloud in mind. They should think about how they can use the cloud to build applications that are scalable, flexible, and resilient. They also need to think about how they can use the cloud to automate their infrastructure and reduce the risk of human error.

One of the key principles of cloud-native architecture is microservices. Microservices are small, autonomous services that can be deployed and scaled independently. Microservices are designed to be resilient by default, because each service is independent and can continue to function even if another service fails. They are a key component of MACH (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture. Retailers who compose their applications using MACH architecture, build in resilience due to the distributed nature of many small independent services. If one were to go down, the others continue to operate.

When building a cloud-native application, retailers should break down their applications into small, autonomous services and deploy them using containerisation technologies such as Docker or Amazon Elastic Container Service. Containerisation allows retailers to package their applications into standardised units that can be deployed and managed more efficiently. There are other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, that enable retailers to further break down applications utilising serverless technology.

AWS Resilience Hub for Cloud-Native Resilience Management

AWS Resilience Hub is a service that helps you manage and monitor your cloud resources to ensure they are configured correctly and meet your resilience goals. AWS Resilience Hub provides a single view of your resilience posture across multiple AWS services, allowing you to identify and mitigate potential risks before they impact your applications.

With AWS Resilience Hub, you can:

• Define and assess your resilience goals while also assessing your current resilience posture.
• Monitor and manage your resilience posture over time and receive alerts when your resilience goals are at risk.
• Automate resilience management tasks, such as applying configuration changes to your resources when your resilience goals are at risk.

AWS Resilience Hub lifecycle

AWS Resilience Hub is designed to work with your existing AWS resources and services, such as AWS Auto Scaling, AWS CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail. This means that you can use AWS Resilience Hub to manage and monitor your resources in a centralised and consistent way.

Trusted Advisor for Ongoing Cloud Resource Configuration Monitoring

Trusted Advisor is a service that helps you monitor your ongoing cloud resource configuration and ensure that your resources are always optimised for resilience, performance, and security. Trusted Advisor provides a best practice check report that gives you a prioritised list of actions you can take to improve the configuration of your resources.

With Trusted Advisor, you can:

• Monitor your resource configuration and receive alerts when your resources are configured incorrectly.
• Receive best practice recommendations for optimising the configuration of your resources.
• Take automated actions to improve configuration of your resources, such as applying a security configuration to your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

Conclusion

Building resilience into your technology infrastructure is essential for retailers who want to provide a seamless customer experience. While moving workloads to the cloud can provide many benefits, it does not automatically ensure resilience. To achieve true cloud resilience, retailers need to adopt a cloud-native approach to their technology infrastructure and can use tools such as AWS Resilience Hub and Trusted Advisor to manage and monitor their resources.

By taking a proactive approach to resilience, retailers can ensure that they are always ready to meet the demands of their customers, even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

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

Further Reading

• AWS ebook | Architectural guidance for building composable MACH solutions on AWS
• AWS Well-Architected | Reliability pillar
• AWS resilience reporting | Build a resilience reporting dashboard with AWS Resilience Hub and Amazon QuickSight
• MACH Alliance

Related resource:
AWS cloud retail solutions