Believe it or not, but we never had an ick during black Friday (I am a terrible story teller, so I basically spoiled the whole story right there).

Our first black Friday, everyone was on high alert. We double checked all systems, we made sure everything could scale as needed, we were expecting about 10 to 15 times as much traffic and about 3 to 5 times as many orders.

And sure enough, as the timer had run down and the discounts were available, the traffic started to increase. We’re anxiously watching the graphs, seeing the page views climb and comparing that to our system. 
Waiting for the frontend containers to scale up (we were usually running on 3, we had set the upper limit to 100 for the time being, but expected at least 15 or 20 containers), we started to become worried. Nothing happened. They were trotting along as always, slight memory and CPU increase is all we saw.
Page views soared up to the expected numbers (and more at times), but the containers didn’t care at all.

We looked at our backend (all cloud native, yayy!) and saw the invocations go up proportionally to the page views. So at least that was going fine. 
Checking back with the frontend, we started to do some loading time measurements - sure enough the frontend was as fast as it had always been.

Well, turns out, our frontend was well cached and even the increase for the logged in customers was easily manageable by the three containers. The backend systems were not even close to getting anywhere near a limit. And Commercetools didn’t really slow down either (good job!). 

So, the year after, we didn’t really care about black week. Business was happy because they were getting more money, but we had just normal working days. We didn’t do any deployments during black week, but thats it. 

The year after, half of us were on vacation during black week. 

Bottom line: With all the pros and cons of the cloud, this one definitely goes into my book as a pro! I don’t want to imagine what this would have been like with dedicated machines somewhere. Stress free blackweek for the win!

Hey there @Patrick Burkart! First of all, you are amazing storyteller, I read the whole post in a sec!  I could feel the tangible relief you felt when everything worked just fine and I’m glad to read commercetools played a part in it. 

Half of the team was on vacation? Well, that sounds like a fine tradition to me…  #stressfreeblackweek 

Now if we could do something similar for people in retail!