aws-architecture

Black Friday still breaks unprepared AWS estates. July 2026 peak-readiness playbook — CloudFront/WAF edge, predictive Fargate scale, ElastiCache (Redis/Valkey), Aurora + RDS Proxy, and the cost split between baseline and burst.

Retail infrastructure has a specific shape: ~90% of the year sits idle, then peak week hits the P&L. July 2026 refresh — core services, Valkey/cache, SES, PCI scope, peak checklist.

Loyalty, pricing, inventory sync, multi-CDN — retail breaks generic templates. July 2026: buy-vs-build matrix, EventBridge patterns, CloudFront case study (−40% page load).