Six Architecture Decisions That Keep E-Commerce Sites Running on Black Friday

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E-commerce sites can face traffic surges of 10 to 30 times their normal load during peak sale events like Black Friday, often causing crashes at the most revenue-critical moments. Experts identify six key infrastructure decisions that determine whether a store survives such spikes: auto-scaling compute, CDN and caching, a scalable database, stateless architecture, Core Web Vitals optimization, and pre-event load testing. Stateless architecture is highlighted as especially critical, since server-bound sessions prevent auto-scaling from working effectively even when it is correctly configured. One US direct-to-consumer brand rebuilt its stack over four months using these principles and successfully handled a 30x traffic surge with zero downtime, recording its best-ever sales day. Load testing ahead of peak events is emphasized as non-negotiable, as it is the only way to identify weak points before real shoppers encounter them.

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