How to prepare your cloud for an increase in traffic

The holiday season is fast approaching. For industries such as retail and e-commerce, this means a large increase in website traffic, sales, and profits and is often hugely anticipated, both by customers and businesses alike.

While this increase in transactions brings clear benefits, it also adds risk. This is a time of high stress for both systems and teams, and systems that usually perform well may suddenly encounter issues and bottlenecks when traffic exceeds normal volumes.

While performance problems are always an issue to look out for, these challenges can have a much greater impact on your business during such a representative period. A small percentage increase in cart abandonment rate might not sound as concerning, but if we’re looking at a vastly increased number of potential customers, it escalates rapidly.

In fact, cart abandonment rates peak in December when Black Friday and holiday sales lure impulsive shoppers. The challenge intensifies when platforms hinder the user experience. Recent research shows that 39% of U.S. online shoppers abandoned an order in the past quarter, citing reasons such as a “too long or complicated checkout process” (22%) and “website errors or crashes” (17%).

Being prepared for the holiday season will enable you and your business to benefit the most from this period, and mitigate the risk of outages, downtimes, or degraded performance of your services. This article highlights actionable insights that you can leverage today to ensure your business is as prepared as it can be to face the challenges and opportunities that come with the increase in website traffic during holiday season.

Note that even if you have these measures already in place, this is a wonderful opportunity to review some of these configurations and ensure that they are still appropriate for the upcoming period. Remember: expect the best but prepare for the worst!

1. Review the auto-scaling for your applications

Auto-scaling is a feature of cloud computing that enables systems to be scaled up or down automatically based on predetermined situations such as the amount of traffic or resource utilization levels. This is effective both for increasing the performance during high traffic and reducing that capacity whenever there is not enough demand to justify the amount of resources. 

While auto-scaling is available regardless of which cloud your applications are running on, it is key to review the configurations for your systems to ensure that they can handle the increased traffic. Cloud native applications are often able to benefit even further from this capability.

A finely tuned system, with adequate policies and thresholds in place, is effective in avoiding bottlenecks and unnecessary costs.

2. Run load and stress tests prior to predictable traffic peaks

Load and stress tests allow businesses to understand how their e-commerce systems and applications behave when subjected to peaks in demand. This helps in identifying not only how well a system performs under stress, but also where and how they break down.

Running these tests with predicted traffic or historical data for similar periods helps teams identify potential issues or bottlenecks before the season begins. This enables businesses to prepare by adjusting infrastructure to strengthen vulnerable areas and prevent real incidents.

Tests such as these should be run regularly, though the exact frequency depends on factors like how often changes are made to the systems, the pace of demand growth, and the size and scope of changes implemented. However, regardless of frequency, it’s always wise to schedule specific test runs before predictable traffic peaks, like Black Friday or Christmas, even if only a month or a few weeks in advance.

>> You may also like: How caching solutions can solve the performance x accuracy dilemma 

3. Ensure disaster recovery plans are in place and updated

Disaster recovery is the process of identifying what can fail in an e-commerce system and implementing measures to either safeguard it from failing entirely or to enable it to recover from critical failures and resume its operations.

This often goes hand in hand with load and stress tests, as the testing provides the knowledge of which components can fail and the impact of their failure on the overall system. Leveraging resources such as coverage by multiple regions and availability zones, as well as redundancy, can allow systems to display continuous availability even as components fail individually.

When preparing for a traffic peak or a surge in demand, in which each minute of downtime could have a severe impact on sales or customer satisfaction, disaster recovery strategies can be altered ahead of time to increase resilience and minimize potential downtime.

4. Monitoring and observability are your first line of defense

Perhaps one of the most important methods for identifying outages and other disasters is through monitoring your applications and e-commerce infrastructure. Think of this as a huge network of sensors that report on how your entire environment is performing.

Leveraging resources such as AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray enables your business to quickly identify performance issues and service degradation before it becomes an actual problem. Proactive alerts such as these are essential to ensuring your business can quickly respond to any potential situation before it becomes an incident.

>> You may also like: Top rules to embrace DevOps practices 

5. Avoid unexpected costs with cost management tools



One of the challenges of cloud environments is keeping track of all costs associated with the resources in use, especially when we’re talking about systems that scale up and down based on demand. If not managed properly, this can lead to surprise costs on billing.

Therefore, it’s important to monitor resource usage and fine-tune it effectively to avoid resource wastage during high traffic. Cost management tools such as AWS Cost Explorer can be leveraged to provide valuable insights that will assist you in preparing ahead of time for such moments.

>> You may also like: Cloud costs drop 35% with tagging strategy and resource optimization

6. Leverage dynamic load balancing to distribute traffic effectively

Load balancing is the technology that allows multiple servers or resources to be used simultaneously for handling an increased demand, which becomes increasingly more complex as these servers scale up and down dynamically.

Resources such as Elastic Load Balancers enable the automatic distribution of traffic across several servers and ensure that the extra traffic is managed effectively as applications scale to match the demand.

7. Rely on content delivery networks for static content

Content Delivery Networks or CDN are tools such as Amazon CloudFront that distribute static content, such as images, globally. The CDN then ensures the content is accessible with reduced latency, as it provides multiple servers for distributing the data to your customers across the globe. Additionally, leveraging such tools enables you to relieve the stress on the origin servers for the content.

>> More about CDNs: How Cilia successfully migrated 600M files in 8 days while ensuring uninterrupted system access  

8. Prepare your e-commerce with security resources

While security would merit an entire article by itself, in the context of this list, we recommend leveraging protections such as AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Shield. These tools can help you and your business mitigate DDoS attacks and other threats that tend to spike in periods of increased traffic and may have a huge impact on your system’s availability.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks flood servers, blocking legitimate users from accessing a website or service. This outage stops your customers from making purchases or using your services. 

9. Embrace tools that ensure high availability for your databases

Leveraging services such as Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, which implement automatic replication, backups, and failover between availability zones can ensure that your services maintain uptime even if individual resources are having problems.

10. Purchase reserved instances ahead of time

When predicting specific workloads, purchasing reserved instances ahead of time, as well as leveraging spot instances for non-critical workloads, allows you to benefit from cost savings during predicted traffic peaks.

The most important thing to remember is that maintaining an efficient business in the digital space is often more of a matter of culture than it is a once-in-a-lifetime event. 

Following through the suggestions here might mitigate risks or identify potential issues before they impact your customers. However, to be truly prepared, teams must understand that efficiency requires constant care. Even if you have these measures already in place, this is a wonderful opportunity to review some of these configurations and ensure that they are still appropriate for the holiday season. Expect the best but prepare for the worst!

Once your teams have this understanding of how to maintain a culture of excellence regarding your infrastructure, you’ll be truly prepared to face the challenges and opportunities that come with each new holiday season.

Ensure your business is prepared and secure for the holiday season. Schedule a consultation now!