Don’t Sell Your Soul to Amazon: Cloud Applications and Architectures for Retail

Retailers are increasingly adopting cloud applications and architectures to compete with giants like Amazon. Cloud platforms offer modern infrastructure that can manage data and transactions at any scale while supporting application development. The key is developing applications that reflect the cloud's modular and distributed architecture, often requiring re-architecting existing applications into containerized microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes. This allows retailers to integrate their retail sales platforms with centralized business processes and choose from a robust marketplace of cloud-based services. Additionally, adopting a distributed SQL database like CockroachDB can provide consistency, reliability, performance, and scale necessary for maintaining customer experiences and integrating systems.