Ensure your e-commerce website does not go down with resiliency planning using AWS
The cost of downtime for e-commerce is huge. You’ll deal with lost revenue, gaps in customer trust and overall brand damage. That’s why resiliency planning is now a foundational requirement, not an option, and real resiliency comes from how you architect your environment. Today, we’ll help you ensure your e-commerce website does not go down with resiliency planning using AWS. Don’t have the right team in-house to help? Get Wirebox on the case with our AWS consultancy service.
Defining your business continuity objectives
The first step towards protecting your business is defining your goals. Begin with a summary of risk factors, such as traffic spikes, DDoS attacks, human error, deployment issues or natural disasters, and categorise them as high, medium or low risk. Clarify for the record what ‘acceptable downtime’ means for your e-commerce business. All mission-critical applications like checkout, payment gateways and inventory services should be high-impact, but other systems could tolerate brief downtime. Define your targets before you architect anything.
Architecting across multiple availability zones
Single-AZ deployments put e-commerce at risk because they create a single point of failure. So, you’ll want to have a multi-AZ distribution as your AWS foundational resiliency principle with an Application Load Balancer or ALB for traffic distribution and Auto Scaling Groups for seamless recovery and scalability during traffic spikes. Check out our brochure for more on how we could help your business with this.
Amazon Route 53 for reliability
As we just saw in November, DNS resiliency is crucial for e-commerce. This relates to your geo-routing, health checks and the experience of your global audiences. By using Route 53, you can benefit from latency-based routing for faster load times, failover routing if a region or endpoint becomes unhealthy and the ability to route between AWS and non-AWS services. This will enable you to offer a more predictable customer experience, even during partial outages.
Backups
Backups protect your business not only from infrastructure failure, but also from human error and cyberattacks. Thankfully, AWS offers great tools for reliable backups. You can use Amazon EBS Snapshots for server volumes and databases, Amazon S3 for object storage and static site assets and embed a cross-region backup replication for added durability. Having a plan for what, where and how often to back up your resources can give you the confidence that your critical data is protected under any circumstance.
Incident management processes
If you don’t have a resilience plan, likely, you don’t have an incident management process either. But outage preparedness is a core part of resilience. When we work with businesses to create an effective incident response plan, we follow these steps:
- Define clear team roles for your organisation and escalation paths.
- Outline step-by-step recovery procedures to get you back up to normal running.
- Document and update your recovery playbook regularly to keep up with threats.
- Conduct routine DR drills with simulated outages and load testing.
Need us to walk you through this very process? Get in touch today. We’d love to help you plan and execute your AWS resiliency project this year.
