By all accounts, last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday were a huge success for online etailers. Those companies that kept their eCommerce sites up under extreme loads won big while others folded or were crippled by the traffic onslaught. Neiman Marcus missed Black Friday altogether as its site was completely down for nearly two days, costing millions in potential revenue. Target.com also buckled under the heavy load, and PayPal struggled to keep up.
Preparing for the Super Bowl
Craig Thayer, vice president of technology for Sazze,shared in a recent blog that “Black Friday is our Super Bowl.” For this year, Sazze users ran 3 billion queries on Black Friday - 10 times Sazze's typical traffic 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 the company to eliminate the weakest link in scaling infrastructure and bring webscale functionality to its database architecture.
Of course, the Super Bowl is one day out of the year, but the NFL teams play all season. The beauty of preparing for Black Friday is that all the hard work and sacrifices of Craig’s operations team benefit them and the company for the rest of the year.
For more on how Sazze prepares for Black Friday, watch this video.
Bullet-proof your infrastructure for year-round operations
zulily is another eCommerce site that works hard to prepare for traffic surges, to support the company's daily specials. Don Allen, senior director of operations at zulily, shared five steps to bullet proofing infrastructure on a recent webinar.
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 its entirety - click here to register.
No doubt, being prepared for Black Friday or any traffic surge that could hit any time of year requires a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Learn how ScaleArc makes it easy to ready your database infrastructure to handle the non-stop demands of eCommerce/Retail operations.
