Given Affirm’s partnerships with over 300K merchants, Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is our most important period of the year. The traffic during

Scaling Our Database for Peak Season: A 60% Latency Reduction Bonus

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2024-09-19 20:30:05

Given Affirm’s partnerships with over 300K merchants, Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is our most important period of the year. The traffic during BFCM can be 5 to 10 times a normal day’s traffic and we need to handle it without any downtime or performance degradations.

The preparations for BFCM don’t start weeks, or even months, in advance — our planning for BFCM 2024 actually began in late 2023. The preparation is a cross-company effort that includes traffic forecasting, load testing, scaling our systems, ensuring our operations team is ready to handle support load, and so on.

A key part of the preparation includes applying last year’s BFCM learnings to prioritize projects that we expect to be most important for this year’s peak shopping period. In this blog post, we will deep dive into how we built confidence that our Aurora database will scale to the projected traffic for BFCM 2024.

During checkout, Affirm makes a real-time credit decision for every transaction, determining which financial products to offer and enabling approved consumers to choose how to pay for their purchase over time. Checkout runs on Amazon EKS and consists of many microservices. The microservices in turn use multiple AWS Services such as Application Load Balancer (ALB), Amazon Aurora MySQL, and STS.