# Retail AWS Peak Readiness Checklist (July 2026)

## Edge + app

- [ ] CloudFront + S3 for catalog assets; Origin Shield considered for origin protection
- [ ] WAF on checkout / login / APIs (rate + bot controls)
- [ ] ECS/EKS or Lambda max capacity set to a real cost/SLA ceiling
- [ ] Target tracking (or scheduled) scale-out tested 2 weeks before peak

## Data

- [ ] Aurora/RDS: read replicas sized for reporting; connection pooling (RDS Proxy if Lambda-heavy)
- [ ] ElastiCache **Valkey** or Redis OSS: session + catalog hot keys; failover tested
- [ ] EventBridge/SQS for order fan-out (inventory, email, analytics) — not sync HTTP chains

## Email + payments

- [ ] SES: SPF/DKIM/DMARC; dedicated IPs warmed; bounce/complaint automation
- [ ] PCI scope minimized (tokenization / hosted fields); logging redaction verified

## FinOps backstop

- [ ] Budgets + anomaly detection on retail prod account
- [ ] Load test report archived (RPS, p95, max tasks, cost estimate)