Black Friday in e-commerce: technical preparations at 2Performant

Black Friday is an exciting moment for everyone… that anxiously awaits to buy something they want, at a great price. For the ones that work to make it happen, to keep the stores and platforms up and running, it is a time of hard work, sometimes anxiety & unknown.

In September 2019 at 2Performant Talks, I delivered a talk about how we prepare for Black Friday as a company, from a technical point of view.

Agenda:

• dealing with the workload and preventing stress

My purpose, as a tech team leader, is to plan things well ahead, so that our main concern on the Black Friday night will not be about servers, nor about traffic or conversions.
I want our biggest worry to be: what are we going to eat that night? Pizza or Lebanese? Plain popcorn or the salty cheese one?

• how we benchmark and prioritize new features, improvements and optimizations

Having load estimations and expected response time, well in advance, is the key for the technical team to provide excellent performance during out of ordinary events, like Black Friday.

• how we invest (time and money) into making Black Friday smooth

We pay for extra servers and resources, invest development time for optimization and scaling. We test our “nightmare scenarios” and plan ahead how we’d respond in such cases. Even if we are a small team, we take turns and make sure someone is at the office or on call throughout the entire event.

For the full story, see the video recording below (Romanian with English subtitles).

If you can read Romanian, you can also check the slides.