The Black Friday and Cyber Monday period is one of the busiest times in the retail calendar, both in stores and online, and here at Loqate our customers rely on our infrastructure to support their businesses at this crucial time. Over the four-day BFCM period in 2023 we processed over 1 billion requests to our APIs, and we managed this with greater than 99.99% availability! We've seen our request volume increase over 100x in the last 10 years, and managing this requires the right technologies, careful planning, and a great team of people.
With insightful commentary from a cross-section of our brilliant Dev team, I’ll talk you through how we scale our infrastructure to support these increases in traffic, and some of the technologies and processes we use. I’ll also give some insights into how the team works together over this busy period to keep everything running smoothly.

Devoxx

A conference talk by a senior developer advocate at Locate (GBG) detailing how the company handles over 1 billion transactions during Black Friday. Covers the evolution from on-premise data centers to cloud infrastructure, the 12/15-factor cloud-native methodology, load testing strategies (platform and product testing at 6x capacity), manual pre-scaling 1-2 weeks before peak, use of Google PubSub for async queue-based architecture, Google Premium Tier networking for low-latency global traffic, and lessons from a 2020 worldwide outage caused by firewall limits misidentifying rerouted traffic as DDoS. Key takeaways include starting capacity testing months in advance, keeping support teams informed, deferring non-critical patches during peak periods, and preferring manual scaling over autoscaling for critical windows.

Black Friday Brilliance: Managing a Billion Transactions with Tech, Tactics, and Teamwork -J.Coleman