In this session, we review the most modern e-commerce architectures, patterns, and technologies that are being used by digital innovators. We examine micro-services as well as event-driven and event-sourced architectures. We provide examples of how these patterns are implemented on AWS, and we review the benefits of each one. Learn how to select a pattern for your workload and which combination of AWS services can be used to build them. We use real-world customer examples so you can see the practical applications of these patterns.

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Next-Generation Ecommerce
Architectures
Bastien Leblanc
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
R E T 2 0 7
Charlie Wilkinson
Head of Architecture
River Island

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Agenda
Introduction
 Modernize your existing retail systems
 Build next generation e-commerce systems
 E-commerce event sourcing
Conclusion and next steps

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Ecommerce: it’s hard (and it’s getting harder)
Scale is different between customers …

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E-commerce : it’s hard (and it’s getting harder)
• Scale
• Upgrade & Adapt
• Observability
• Future Proof
How to handle your (often unpredictable) peaks ?
How to update, upgrade, adapt at scale ?

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Scale: legacy ways of solving it
• Buy new servers
• Refuse connections
• Build a bigger monolith
• Tell your business you cannot
do more
• We have to find a better way

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 Modernize your existing retail systems
• Classical e-commerce applications typically used by retailers:
• The same principles to modernize apply to almost all n-tiers legacy e-
commerce applications
IBM WebSphere
Commerce
Oracle ATG
Web Commerce
SAP Hybris

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Typical n-tier ecommerce architecture

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Typical n-tier ecommerce architecture: the database

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Typical n-tier ecommerce architecture: application

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SAP Hybris on AWS by Piksel Retail
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/hosting-sap-hybris-commerce-on-aws-with-piksel-retail/
SAP Hybris

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River Island bespoke .NET stack

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Why build your next-generation ecommerce?
• Pressure from the business to change
• We cannot change the website for six
months
• Lots of businesses are extending their
freeze period
• Scale
• Agility
• Lots of smaller changes => better
uptime and knowledge of your system
Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

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Architecture principles for next-gen ecommerce

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Next-generation ecommerce: where to start?
• Search
• Catalog
• Content
• Pricing
• Offers
• Payment
• Promotions
• Inventory
• Consumer
Profile
• Cart &
Checkout
• Product
MDM
Next Steps
• Break up your monolith
• Build services independently
• Expose services via APIs
• Expose business events
• Focus your tech design
around capabilities
Typical ecommerce capabilities:

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Architecture design implementation
These principles lead to some choices to make on implementation:
- Decoupling/Messaging
- Exchange of the event objects, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon MQ,
or Amazon Kinesis?
- Storing
- Which object store or database to choose?
- Compute
- Where and how to run your ecommerce application?

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Compute for ecommerce applications
Principles:
- Flexible
- Massive scale
- Cost-effective
- Efficient code delivery

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Compute: serverless at River Island

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Compute: serverless at River Island

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Decouple
Principles:
- Loose coupling
- API or messaging as a pattern
- Business functions: one at a time

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Next-gen ecommerce architecture: decouple

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Store: object store or database?
Principles
- Open and extensible
- Cloud native
- Multi-region ready
- Scale ready

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Store: object store or database?

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Store: River Island’s choices
Amazon S3 as
the foundation
of our data lake
Aurora for
MySQL
compatibility &
great features
Amazon
DynamoDB for
key/value
Streams
bonus!
Some teams
like Postgres!
PostgreSQL

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29. “The fundamental idea of event sourcing is that of
ensuring every change to the state of an application is
captured in an event object, and that these event
objects are themselves stored in the sequence they
were applied for the same lifetime as the application
state itself. Martin Fowler
https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

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 Event Sourcing E-commerce
Principles:
- Event object: Everything must be captured as an
event
- Kinesis or SQS
- Stored in S3
- Sequence: Event objects must be stored, queryable
and re-playable
- All events in S3: good news, you can query them directly (Amazon
Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, etc. )
- Snapshots (on schedule): limit the replays
- Reverse dependencies

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Compute: serverless at River Island

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Next-generation ecommerce on AWS
Static content
Data Lake
StorageMessagingComputeAPI

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What’s next? Go build your e-commerce platform !
- Start from customers and build your
business
- Build a migration plan
- Migrate / Lift & Shift your on-premise
stack
- Choose one business function to be built
on the next generation stack & iterate
- Measure success
- Start small and Think Big
Photo by Jace Abshire on Unsplash

35. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Bastien Leblanc
@bastLeblanc
Charlie Wilkinson
@kabadisha

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