Black Friday - how to avoid falling services?

Very soon, the so-called “Black Friday” will come, the day of discounts, when millions of shoppers stormed online and offline stores in search of cool goods with a monstrous discount. The influx of buyers on this day is noted by almost all companies that sell something. And by the way, there is also Cyber ​​Monday, when online stores hold a holiday for customers again.

The fact that traffic and the number of customers is growing is good. But are you ready for Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday for real? More precisely, is your infrastructure ready for the events of these two days? The fact is that not many enterprises are preparing these servers besides shelves in real stores these days. And they can fail at the most crucial moment, if not prepared properly.

What needs to be done so that it is not excruciatingly painful?

1. Evaluate the capabilities of your equipment / infrastructure by evaluating customer activity last year. Not necessarily your own buyers - after all, this may be the first "Black Friday" for you. You need to look at the documentation and publications on the network with analytics - a lot of such documents and descriptions are published. Evaluate, for example, the number of transactions per second, the level of traffic and adapt the data for yourself. After this, it is worth preparing the equipment, adding additional servers and racks if necessary.

2. Make sure you have a backup, and review your plan for unexpected equipment failures. If something still goes wrong, can you recover your data without problems? It is also worth a test. We wrote about how to do this in one of our past articles.

3. Check the hardware and software infrastructure . At this stage, it is worth evaluating the level of health of the hard drives, assessing the status of the UPS and the backup energy infrastructure (if there is one, of course). Everything should work well now. Otherwise, the equipment or some database may fail at the most inopportune moment.

4. Is the server or their group working normallythat provide the database? To verify this, you need to conduct a stress test. Also make sure your web applications are optimally configured. Clustering SQL server and database replication is a good solution to ensure high availability and fault tolerance of equipment.



5. Update the statistics system . At this stage, it is worth sending information that is no longer used to the archive. If everything is done correctly, this step will significantly increase the performance of the software part, including query performance. During the reorganization of indexes, you can send archived data to a backup or other database.

6. Solve current problems.. If there are problems, even if they are small, they must be resolved before the hour "H". The fact is that the problems are small until the load increases. During a significant increase in traffic, all problems will manifest themselves in all dazzling glory, which can lead to a collapse of infrastructure and services. Clean everything that slows down the database.

7. If you expect a certain level of traffic, tune the equipment to even higher rates . Who knows, what if visitors decide to come to you in more quantity than you expected? Better safe than sorry. Of course, a multiple margin of “strength” is not always needed; here it is necessary to adequately assess the situation. Overall, retailers usually talk about tenfold growth in Internet visitors.

8.Make sure that all necessary updates and patches, especially those related to security systems, are installed and updated. User data must be encrypted, servers are prepared for possible attacks. Yes, this day not only well-meaning users are interested in the servers of various companies.

In general, we can say that Black Friday is both good and evil for telecommunication companies and retailers. Despite the fact that there can be many buyers, preparing for Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday takes a lot of time and consumes a lot of resources. If you do not prepare thoroughly enough, the problems can be very large. In some cases, retailers reported losses of $ 5,000 per minute due to the collapse of servers providing the necessary services. Nobody wants to lose money, so we recommend that you prepare well.