Retail E-Commerce Backend Migration to AWS

The situation

Retail backends are often built around the calendar. Servers are bought for the holiday rush, then run at a fraction of their capacity for most of the year. The storefront, order management, inventory and store integrations share databases and network paths that grew over many years. When the hardware lease or data center contract comes up for renewal, moving to the cloud makes sense, but a failed cutover during trading is not an option.

Teams in this situation need a migration plan that respects the retail calendar, keeps the business running, and does not replace a hardware bill with an unmanaged cloud bill.

Our approach

1. Discover and plan waves

We start with a four-week assessment. We inventory servers, databases and integrations, map dependencies from network flows and configuration, and classify each workload as rehost, replatform or refactor. Workloads are then grouped into migration waves, scheduled around trading peaks and change freezes. Low-risk internal systems go first; the order and payment path goes when the team has practiced the process.

2. Build the landing zone first

Before any workload moves, we set up a multi-account AWS environment with AWS Control Tower and Terraform: separate accounts for production, non-production, shared services, logging and security. Service control policies, centralized logging, single sign-on and network connectivity to stores and warehouses are in place from day one. If you handle card data, the account and network design supports PCI DSS scoping, which we help you prepare for.

3. Migrate in waves

Stable workloads are rehosted with AWS Application Migration Service, which replicates servers continuously and lets us test in AWS before cutover. Databases move to Amazon RDS with AWS DMS, keeping the source and target in sync until the switch. Customer-facing services that need elastic scaling are replatformed onto Amazon EKS. Each wave has rehearsed cutover and rollback steps and a short, planned maintenance window.

4. Prepare for peak season

Storefront services scale pods on request load, and Karpenter adds and removes nodes as needed. CloudFront caches catalog pages and images at the edge, and ElastiCache takes session and catalog reads off the database. Before each peak, we run load tests at expected holiday traffic and adjust scaling limits and database capacity based on what the tests show.

5. Build in cost control and recovery

Every resource is tagged by team and workload, and budgets alert owners before overspend. After a few weeks of real usage, we right-size instances, move steady workloads to Savings Plans, and schedule non-production environments to shut down out of hours. AWS Backup copies data to a second region, and we run recovery drills on a schedule so recovery time and recovery point targets are verified, not assumed.

How we deliver it

We run the migration as a joint team with your operations staff, who take on more of each wave as the project progresses. All infrastructure lives in Terraform with pipeline-driven changes, and each wave ends with updated runbooks and dashboards. Before the order and payment wave, we run a full rehearsal in a production-like environment, including a timed cutover, data validation checks and a rollback test. Once the last wave is complete, we work with you to decommission the remaining on-premises servers and close out network links that are no longer needed, so you stop paying for both environments. See our cloud services and DevOps consulting for how we work after go-live.

Is this relevant to you?

If your data center contract is up for renewal, your capacity is sized for one week a year, or disaster recovery has never been tested, this blueprint is a good starting point. Get in touch to plan your first migration wave.