How Spring Prepares for the Black Friday Frenzy

With the help of Uncubed and Amazon Web Services, we shot this video late last year to share a story about a scalability issue we had during Black Friday 2016 and the work we did to avoid that for Black Friday 2017 using AWS infrastructure.

It should come as no surprise that Black Friday is one of the busiest days of the year for a marketplace like Spring as retailers offer deep discounts and shoppers really jump into their holiday shopping.

Our engineering team generally spends a few months leading up to that day running drills, gathering metrics and tuning systems, prepping, pre-emptively scaling, and just generally ensuring everything is in tip top shape to handle traffic for that one day in which we will often see 20 or 30 times the volume that we’d see on a normal day.

Without further delay, here’s the video we shot where I told a story about one such optimization:

Happy to report that the scalability work we did ensured that part of our system functioned smooth as silk for this last holiday season!

Published 25 Apr 2018

Scaling and leading engineering and data teams to solve the world's problems
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