Black Friday (BF in the jargon) is a big event for an e-commerce platform. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to get hammered by customers looki

How Back Market SREs prepared for Black Friday

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2021-07-12 12:30:06

Black Friday (BF in the jargon) is a big event for an e-commerce platform. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to get hammered by customers looking for good deals. At Back Market, we easily get five times the normal traffic during this period, and making sure we’re prepared for the event is always a big part of autumn. With the company’s growth and the constant changes in our architecture, every Black Friday has been a pain: new and unexpected issues, plannings blown up by last-minute fixes.

2019 was a strong vintage in this respect. We had opened several countries since Black Friday 2018, our traffic had steadily grown year-on-year and many components were starting to show signs of struggle. Incidents were increasing in frequency and we were a bit late in bringing those components up to speed to give them room to breathe. With the big day looming and everyone focusing on their own perimeters, an informal poll in the company two weeks before the event made evident that no one was confident our platform could handle it: big oops. What ensued were ten days of a frantic war room, with emergency fixes based on everyone’s gut feelings, lots of uncertainty, and a stressful Black Weekend.

The post-mortem of 2019 left us with a sizable backlog of improvements for 2020. All teams took their share of those improvements in their own plannings and started working on them over the year.