Bulletproofing for Black Friday

The holiday season, especially Black Friday, is a goldmine for e-commerce apps—but only if they can handle the traffic. When the surge hits, unprepared applications buckle under pressure, leading to frustrated users and crashed servers. Been there, done that...

In this talk, I’ll share some e-commerce horror stories from the trenches and show you how to avoid becoming one. We’ll dive into a proven roadmap to reliability using production cloning, traffic generation, and real-time observability.

With these strategies (plus a dash of your magic), you’ll have the perfect recipe to ensure your app withstands the holiday rush—and you can relax, knowing your system won’t let you down

Transcript

1. Bulletproofing for Black Friday Thomas di Luccio
2. A talk on how to stress test, improve , and scale your Sylius app
3. backstory I failed so you don’t have to
6. and I crashed production on launch day
7. • Based in Lyon, France • Former designer and educator • Loves cooking and baking • Visual art, storytelling, photography • @thomasdiluccio.bsky.social Thomas di Luccio (He/Him) DevRel @ Platform.sh, Upsun, Blackfire Who am I?
8. Why we failed? We had no idea what to expect
9. On-demand blank Black Fridays in controlled environment
10. Learning #1 Stress test your app before D-day
11. Break your app before your users do
13. • Gatling • Locust • Artillery • … Invest in load testing tools:
14. INVEST Invest time and/or money now to do something in one-click in the future
15. Recreate real-life user journeys
21. Identify and extend the breaking point
22. Are we there yet?
24. Learning #2 Work on carbon-copies of your production
25. Package, provision, and deploy to production all from Git
26. Infrastructure as code # .upsun/config.yaml applications: sylius: hooks: build: | set -x -e curl -fs https://get.symfony.com/cloud/configurator | bash NODE_VERSION=18 symfony-build deploy: | set -x -e symfony-deploy web: locations: root: ‘public’ passthru: ‘/index.php’ expires: 1h relationships: database: ‘postgresql:postgresql’ type: ‘php:8.2’
27. Instant full preview environments
28. Always work in production-like environments
29. Are we there yet?
31. Learning #3 Integrate Observability in your workflows
32. Observability?
33. Observability Ability to witness the real behavior of an app, detect bottlenecks, improve and control performance
34. Observability Bionic glasses for your applications
35. Continuous observability solution
36. Proactively identify existing bottlenecks and the consequences of upcoming changes
43. Your objectives: • Identify improvements opportunities • Secure performance and UX • Scale your application correctly
44. We are almost there
46. Learning #4 Scale correctly
47. What part of your app needs what resources to achieve what results ?
48. Your objectives: • Identify requirements per containers • Balance the load • Scale your workers
51. What have we learned?
52. Stress test our app without DDoSing our prod
53. Instant production cloning
54. Rely on 360 observability
55. Fine-grain resource allocation
56. Et voilà !
58. Thank you! Thomas di Luccio DevRel Engineer, Platform.sh thomas.diluccio@platform.sh
59. Get Keanu stickers at the booth!
60. Thank you! Thomas di Luccio DevRel Engineer, Platform.sh thomas.diluccio@platform.sh