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Guidance for Web Store on AWS

Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how to build a headless ecommerce web application, using AWS services to implement a frontend web user interface (UI), backend services, and core ecommerce capabilities. These core capabilities include search, personalization, marketing, fraud detection, customer authentication, location services, and chatbots. The Guidance is designed to enrich the customer experience through an ecommerce web application that is both scalable and cost-effective.

How it works

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.
Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating the steps and AWS services involved in a web store solution. The diagram details the flow from users (via browser or mobile apps) through services such as Amazon Cognito, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, API Gateway, AWS Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, and integration with third-party services, clearly outlining both frontend (web tier) and backend (app tier) components.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.
Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram depicting the architecture of an AWS-powered web store, showing key AWS services and steps 8 to 13 including components such as AWS Fargate, Lambda, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EventBridge, EFS, S3, SQS, MSK, and key third-party integrations for payment, order management, analytics, and more.

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 majority of the services in this Guidance are either AWS managed or serverless, reducing your operational overhead. This allows the undifferentiated "heavy lifting" of maintaining infrastructure and servers or services to be offloaded to AWS.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

The “front door” of the architecture is CloudFront, which allows you to enable TLS to secure data in transit. You can also use AWS WAF and AWS Shield to protect from any malicious attacks. Data at rest in AWS is encrypted in a way that allows you to choose an encryption key.

All the services in the architecture diagram can be protected with fine-grained, resource-level permissions. Services communicate with one another through service roles.

Read the Security whitepaper 

The core compute services in this Guidance can be deployed in multiple Availability Zones for high availability. Amazon S3 provides 99.9999999% (11 9s) of data durability. Additionally, all other services in the architecture diagram can be configured for resiliency to address your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

This Guidance efficiently handles varying request volumes through the serverless architecture diagram. It also makes use of CloudFront, ElastiCache, and DAX to cache data at various tiers, improving application performance.

You have complete control to choose the most appropriate configurations for each of the services to meet your requirements for performance efficiency, such as allocating the right vCPUs and storage for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) tasks or choosing the read capacity units (RCUs) and web access control list (ACL) capacity units (WCU) for DynamoDB.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

The serverless services used in this Guidance allow you to pay only for the exact resources you use. A benefit of AWS managed services is that there are no costs for maintaining servers. Additionally, cache layering at different tiers eliminates the frequency of data or service access, further reducing costs.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Compute services in the architecture diagram are serverless, contributing to the overall sustainability of this Guidance. For more efficient sustainability, you can choose latest AWS Graviton processors for the compute services.

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.