By all accounts, last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday were a huge success for online etailers. Those companies that kept their eCommerce site up under extreme loads won big while others folded or were crippled by the traffic onslaught. Neiman Marcus missed Black Friday altogether as their site was completely down for nearly two days costing them millions in potential revenue. While not as severe as Neiman Marcus, Target.com buckled under the heavy load and PayPal struggled to keep up.
Preparing for the Super Bowl
Craig Thayer, vice president of technology for Sazze, stated in a recent blog that “Black Friday is our Super Bowl”. For this year, Sazze users ran 3 billion queries on Black Friday, which is 10 times their normal load. One area of huge success for Sazze was the ability to “add more capacity without actually adding more capacity”. This capability and more allowed them to elminate the weakest link in scaling infrastructure and bring webscale functionality to their database architecture.
Of course, the Super Bowl is one day out of the year, but the NFL play all season. The beauty of preparing for Black Friday means that all the hard work and sacrifices that Craig’s operations team put in benefit them for the rest of the year.
For more, watch the video on Sazze's tips on prepping for Black Friday-->
Bullet-proofing Infrastructure for year-round operations
zulily is another eCommerce site that enjoyed zero downtime during last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Don Allen, senior director of operations at zulily, gave the five steps to bullet proofing your infrastructure year-round.
1. Baseline and instrument your environment– understand the input and output of your infrastructure
2. Scale your infrastructure– build scaling in each tier (web, databases, etc.)
3. Perform load testing– stress test your infrastructure components to go beyond pass/fail
4. Apply security controls– protect against attacks and understand your vulnerabilities
5. Plan for failover– automate failover of your key infrastructure
You can view the zulily webinar in it's entirety. Click here to register.
No doubt, being prepared for year-round events require a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Learn how ScaleArc simplifies the preparation of your database infrastructure for year-round eCommerce/Retail operations.