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Over the past decade, retailers have seen dramatic shifts in consumer buying
behavior as shoppers move online to research products, read consumer reviews,
compare prices, and purchase. Faced with competition from digital-native compa-
nies and e-commerce startups, incumbent businesses are building competencies in
areas such as just-in-time inventory, warehouse automation, omnichannel
shopping, and personalized customer experience. Technology innovation in retail
is driven by the need to create a competitive advantage by delivering always avail-

“
able, differentiated services more quickly while reducing costs and business risks.

Retail organizations are Microservices and application modernization initiatives promise to deliver agility,
building business-critical scalability, and resilience. Modern applications need systems of record that deliver
resilience and scale without compromising performance. YugabyteDB is an open
microservices such as
source, cloud native, distributed database that uniquely combines enterprise-grade
shopping carts, shopping relational database capabilities with the horizontal scalability and resilience of cloud
lists, product catalogs, native architectures. Retail organizations are building business-critical microser-
pricing, promotions, and vices such as shopping carts, shopping lists, product catalogs, pricing, promotions,
and payment systems using YugabyteDB as the system of record.
payment systems using
YugabyteDB as the
system of record.

Accelerate Time Reduce Cost Achieve Compliance

to Market Deliver Spend up to 80% less Comply with privacy
high-value on technology while regulations, sovereignty
applications achiev-ing operational laws, and industry stan-
more quickly. efficien-cies with no dards while mitigating risk.
lock-in.

Cloud Native Database for Demanding Applications

YugabyteDB is a perfect fit for transactional applications that demand resilience,
scalability, and consistently high performance. Deploy YugabyteDB across any
hybrid or public cloud, VMs, or containers with no lock-in for all mission-critical
applications.

PostgreSQL Compatibility

YugabyteDB is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL, offering the most complete

set of PostgreSQL compatible features available in a distributed SQL DB. This
allows developers to be immediately productive using familiar features,
applications, drivers, and tools. They can also easily migrate commercial
relational databases to YugabyteDB cost-effectively and with low risk.

Distributed SQL Database for Retail | 1

 Resilience and High Availability

Unplanned and planned downtime can cost retail organizations millions of

dollars in lost revenue. With YugabyteDB, data remains available during node,
zone, region, and data center failures and maintenance tasks. The database heals
itself by re-replicating data automatically, delivering zero downtime. An Azure
zone outage does not have to result in downtime for business-critical microser-
vices such as order processing.

“
We have been leveraging
YugabyteDB as the
Horizontal Scalability to Meet Business Demand

Retailers and e-commerce businesses can reliably handle spikes in traffic

distributed SQL database during events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday by scaling their most
running natively inside demand-ing services without disruption or performance degradation. The
Kubernetes to power the YugabyteDB database is proven to handle hundreds of thousands of
transactions per second with hundreds of terabytes of data in production.
business-critical apps
that require scale and
Geo-Distribution
high availability.
YugabyteDB offers the most flexible deployment options in geo-distributed
— Mahesh Thyagarajan, environments - synchronous and asynchronous data replication as well as
geo-partitioning to achieve desired resilience, performance, and compliance
VP Engineering, Kroger
objectives. In retail and e-commerce, geo-distributed applications and data
enable organizations to deliver faster response times for real time interactions
from locations nearest to customers.

Transactional Consistency

Distributed multi-row ACID transactions are a critical requirement for many

retail and e-commerce applications. Having transactional consistency in the
data layer eliminates the burden of managing consistency in applications.

Operational Efficiency

Yugabyte Platform enables enterprises to deploy YugabyteDB across any

cloud anywhere in the world effortlessly, and streamline day 2 operations
with automated management and monitoring. Operations teams get the
support and services they need to successfully deliver a private database-as-
a-service cost-effectively.

Security

YugabyteDB is built from the ground up with data security in mind. The data-
base enables organizations to maintain a robust security posture with built-in
controls such as LDAP authentication, role-based access control (RBAC),
data encryption at rest and in transit (TLS), audit logging, and column-level
permissions. Yugabyte Platform simplifies security operations with automatic
security key rotation, rolling software updates, and other capabilities.

Distributed SQL Database for Retail | 2

 Case Studies in Retail
YugabyteDB is a perfect fit for transactional applications that demand
resilience, scalability, and consistently high performance. Deploy YugabyteDB
across any hybrid or public cloud, VMs, or containers with no lock-in for all
mission-critical applications.

“
Kroger

Yugabyte helped Narvar Kroger is the largest supermarket by revenue in the United States. Kroger oper-
avoid cloud lock-in, ates over 2,750 supermarkets and multi-department stores. The digital channel
has been the largest growing part of Krogerʼs business, especially during the
stay GDPR compliant,
COVID-19 crisis. This is driving new modalities, for example where customers
and save money in the order online and pick up from a store.
process. Partnering with
Yugabyte helps us focus As part of its digital transformation initiative, Kroger looked to modernize its
aging technology while addressing scalability, reliability, observability, and
on our customers instead
monitoring. The company shifted to a microservices based architecture running
of worrying if our systems in a hybrid cloud environment. With hundreds of microservices and service
can keep pace with our backed experiences, scalability and availability were key factors. Kroger also has
rapidly growing business. a strong preference to use commercial open source software that offers freedom
of choice in cloud environments.
— Ram Ravichandran,
Kroger chose YugabyteDB for several reasons, including distributed ACID trans-
CTO, Narvar actions, scalability, multi-region active-active deployments for resilience, multi-
API support, and automatic data sharding. YugabyteDB clusters were deployed
in a multiple AZ's/regions/cross clouds configuration with synchronous
replication, achieving single digit millisecond latency. Kroger also deployed two
clusters in different regions with bi-directional asynchronous replication for its
shopping list application. These clusters were close to users to deliver low
latencies.

“We have been leveraging YugabyteDB as the distributed SQL database running
natively inside Kubernetes to power the business-critical apps that require scale
and high availability.”
— Mahesh Thyagarajan, VP Engineering
Top 5 Global Retailer

An American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermar-

kets, department stores, and grocery stores in countries around the world
sought a new database for its product identification microservice. This service
uniquely identifies each product in the catalog offered by several sellers on its
website.

Key selection criteria included resilience, high availability, and performance

that scales with growth cost-effectively. The ability to deploy the database in
any cloud in a geo-distributed topology across AZ's, regions and countries was
also important. Other considerations included support for multi-key ACID
transac-tions and alternate key lookups.

Distributed SQL Database for Retail | 3

 The retail corporation had migrated from Oracle to Cassandra to handle expo-
nential data growth and performance needs. But the lack of distributed trans-
actions and RDBMS capabilities in Cassandra forced the team to implement one-
to-one and many-to-one bidirectional indexes in the application layer, which
increased time to market for new services and introduced fragility into the appli-
cations. They evaluated Azure CosmosDB, Azure Cloud SQL, and other databases
but were not satisfied with the performance and resiliency characteristics of any
candidates.

With YugabyteDB, the customer got everything they were looking for – linear
scale with product growth, open source licensing, cloud-agnostic geo-distributed
deployment, resilience, and RDBMS capabilities such as multi-row ACID transac-
tions and alternate key lookups. YugabyteDB enabled the retailer to support a
product catalog of more than 100 million items with billions of mappings, serving
over 100,000 queries per second.

Narvar

Narvar provides a customer experience SaaS platform trusted by over 800 retail-ers
including Sephora, Patagonia, Levi’s, Bose, Warby Parker, Home Depot, LVMH, and
L’Oréal to deliver personalized experiences from pre-purchase to in-store
touchpoints and beyond.

Narvar was challenged with AWS databases becoming expensive at scale, while
customers and data privacy regulations demanded a multi-cloud solution. Narvar
looked for an open source and cloud native database with support for multi-cloud
and multi-AZ deployments and available as a managed service. Key criteria included
high performance, ease of scaling, and low variance in cost per query.

Narvar switched to YugabyteDB and achieved 4x lower TCO while gaining scale,
performance, and zero downtime in the process. There were no service disrup-tions
during spikes in traffic, and Narvar was able to support multiple clouds based on
customer requests.

“Yugabyte helped Narvar avoid cloud lock-in, stay GDPR compliant and save money
in the process. Partnering with Yugabyte helps us focus on our customers instead
of worrying if our systems can keep pace with our rapidly growing business.”
— Ram Ravichandran, CTO, Narvar

Want to learn even more about YugabyteDB’s Visit yugabyte.com today to:
extremely low latency, massive scale, and compre-
hensive set of multi-region deployment options? Get Started Contact Us Schedule A Demo