Scaling Architecture for a Black Friday Surge
Client profile
Multi-brand online retailer
Timeline
10 Weeks
Peak Traffic
50k req/sec
Key Outcome
No downtime at peak
The Problem Worth Solving
An online retailer experienced severe downtime during the previous year's holiday sales events. Their monolithic storefront could not handle sudden traffic spikes, costing them revenue on their single biggest trading day and damaging customer trust.
How We Thought About It
We load-tested the legacy setup to establish a performance baseline and identify the exact bottlenecks — the checkout flow and the product image CDN were the two critical failure points. We recommended a headless commerce architecture and validated it against a ten-times traffic simulation before committing the client to the full migration.
What We Built
We migrated the frontend to a headless commerce architecture using Next.js, decoupled from the commerce backend via GraphQL. We implemented edge caching and optimised Core Web Vitals to improve both search visibility and conversion. A staged rollout let us run A/B traffic between the old and new stacks during the final two weeks.
What Changed
The site handled its peak trading day at roughly fifty thousand concurrent requests without downtime. Page load times improved by around three times, which lifted both search performance and checkout completion. The client traded through the following peak season on the same architecture without further intervention.
“The year before, we lost our biggest sales day to downtime. This time it was the quietest day our engineering team had.”
Head of E-Commerce
Multi-brand online retailer, Malaysia
Tech Stack Used
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