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RetailCloud

E-commerce Platform Achieves 99.99% Uptime with DR

Multi-brand Retail Group
Dallas, TX
150 employees
5 months
<15 min
recovery time
Started:Jun 2023
Duration:5 months
Completed:Nov 2023

The Challenge

StyleHub, an e-commerce platform for 5 retail brands, experienced a catastrophic Black Friday outage in 2022. A database failure in their single-region infrastructure took the platform offline for 4 hours during peak shopping.

The direct cost was $2M in lost sales. The indirect cost-damaged brand reputation, lost customer trust, and competitor gains-was harder to quantify but potentially larger.

The leadership set a clear mandate: be ready for Black Friday 2023 with guaranteed uptime. Failure was not an option.

Our Approach

1

Failure Analysis & Architecture

Month 1

Analyzed Black Friday failure, identified single points of failure, and designed multi-region active-active architecture.

2

Data Replication Setup

Month 2

Implemented real-time database replication, synchronized caching layers, and established consistency requirements.

3

Automated Failover

Month 3-4

Deployed Route 53 health checks, automated failover procedures, and chaos engineering tests.

4

DR Testing & Documentation

Month 5

Conducted full failover tests, created runbooks, and trained team on DR procedures. Completed before Black Friday.

Solution Overview

Multi-region disaster recovery architecture, automated failover, real-time data replication, and quarterly DR testing with documented runbooks.

The Results

RTO reduced from 8+ hours to under 15 minutes
RPO achieved under 1 minute
Zero unplanned downtime since implementation
Successfully handled 5x Black Friday traffic

Business Impact

Revenue Generated
Protected $8M Black Friday revenue
Productivity Gain
On-call burden reduced with automated recovery
Risk Reduction
RTO reduced from 8+ hours to <15 minutes

"Last Black Friday we had zero downtime despite traffic spikes. PlatOps paid for itself in one day."

S
Steven Chen, VP of Technology
Multi-brand Retail Group

"We actually tested failover during Black Friday prep. Customers noticed nothing. That's the goal."

M
Maria Santos, SRE Lead
Multi-brand Retail Group

Key Takeaways

  • DR investment is insurance that pays off dramatically when needed
  • Active-active is expensive but necessary for critical retail
  • Quarterly testing is essential-untested DR plans fail
  • Automated failover removes human error from recovery

Key Outcome

<15 min
recovery time

Technologies Used

AWS Multi-RegionAurora Global DatabaseRoute 53CloudFrontGremlin

Compliance Frameworks

PCI-DSSSOC 2 Type II

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