Retail: peak traffic readiness and scaling runbook

Situation

Previous peaks had pushed checkout to time out, CDN settings were partly guesswork, and marketing’s runbook did not match ops. Peak week is a bad time to discover those gaps for the first time.

What we focused on

• Load profile: Realistic scenarios, browse-heavy vs checkout-heavy, mobile vs desktop.
• Bottlenecks: Database vs app vs payment provider, fixed in priority order.
• War room: Roles, comms channels, and decision rights during the event.

Outcome

Peak passed without revenue-destroying outages and with a reusable playbook for next year.