Surviving peak traffic: elastic e-commerce on AWS

What broke during peaks?

Pages loaded slowly and then stopped responding, at the moment revenue peaked. Two regional festival peaks, Eid and Pohela Boishakh, set the calendar the platform had to meet. Any design has to be proven against that calendar, not against an average day.

What changed?

1. The storefront was re-architected for autoscaling compute behind a load balancer.
2. Static and media assets moved to CloudFront caching, on reseller pricing.
3. Managed databases with read replicas and automated backups.
4. Load tests against the projected peak, with scaling policies and alerts set from the results.

Taken together, these changes let each tier scale on its own. The storefront can grow with demand, while the database and the content path are sized and tested separately.

What to copy, and what to check first.

• Derive the test number from evidence. Ask how the 8× target was set, and whether the factor came from logs or from a campaign plan. A test target you cannot explain will not hold.
• Test checkout as its own flow. Scaling the storefront does not prove the order write path scales.
• Decide what scales down after the peak. Autoscaling without a scale-in plan moves the cost problem to the next month.
• Confirm where card data flows before you design the payment step, and apply the payment-data rules that apply in your jurisdiction.

How to read the results

• 8×. Roughly eight times normal traffic absorbed. A representative engagement result, not a capacity promise.
• No sale-day outages. Reported for the festival events. Not a guarantee for your next campaign.
• CDN cost. Up to about 40 percent lower delivery cost. That is an upper bound on a bandwidth line, not a promise for every bill.

What the case does not establish.

• A catalogue or SKU cost model. No price table is published.
• A capacity guarantee for your store.
• Billing terms outside Bangladesh. Local billing is an arrangement in Bangladesh. Elsewhere, engagements are in USD and quote-based, and other currencies are by contract only.

This page is not legal or tax advice. Confirm the requirements that apply to you, as applicable in your jurisdiction, with your counsel and compliance team.