Case Study: Autoscaling for Black Friday Traffic Surges - Inventive HQ

Project Overview

We assisted an eCommerce client preparing for Black Friday sales. They were experimenting with SMS blasts to promote their deals, which caused a significant spike in web traffic, overwhelming their infrastructure.

Challenges

While their regular email campaigns resulted in thousands of users visiting over the course of a few hours, the SMS campaigns caused thousands of users to visit within minutes. This burst of traffic led to crashes in the components responsible for content management and search. Initially, the client scaled up their server count by 10x to handle the traffic, but this was inefficient during normal operation.

Solution

To solve this, we implemented autoscaling for the affected website components. The infrastructure now runs with 2-3 servers during normal operations, scaling up to 20-30 servers during high traffic periods.

Results

• Normal operation cost: 3 servers at $600/month.
• Peak load cost: 20 servers at $4,000/month.
• Potential cost savings: 85%, allowing the client to scale seamlessly during high traffic periods without overspending during off-peak times.
• The client can now handle any foreseeable traffic spikes without risking downtime.