Black Friday Brilliance: Managing a Billion Transactions with Tech, Tactics, and Teamwork

Track: Practices and other tech

Abstract

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday period is one of the busiest times in the retail calendar, both in stores and online, and our customers rely on our infrastructure to support their businesses at this crucial time. Over this period in 2023 we processed over 1 billion requests to our APIs, and we managed this with greater than 99.99% availability! We've seen our request volume increase over 100x in the last 10 years, and managing this requires the right technologies, careful planning, and a great team of people.

With insightful commentary from a cross-section of our brilliant Dev team, I’ll talk you through how we scale our infrastructure on different Clouds, the technologies and processes that are put in place and problems we have had to overcome in the past. I’ll also give some insights into how the team works together over this busy period to keep everything running smoothly.

Jamie Coleman

Jamie is a Developer Advocate for Loqate formally at IBM & Sonatype, based in the UK. He talks about the importance of security in software, improving developer productivity, data quality AI and raising awareness about energy consumption of technology. Passionate about discovering ways to help reduce developers carbon footprint, he is also a subject matter expert in containerised solutions and build technologies. He fell in love with Java at University and has gone on to talk at many conferences about using Java with microservices and related technologies. He has worked on a wide variety of projects such as modernising IBM CICS mainframe testing infrastructure, creating, and automating the creation of Docker images for IBM’s products and contributing to a DevOps pipeline offering.