The Day The Servers Cried
Black Friday isn't a shopping holiday for us. It's a war zone.
While you were fighting over a 75-inch TV at Walmart, our servers were processing 4 million coupon codes per second. The heat generated by our data center could have warmed a small European country.
DID YOU KNOW: We found exactly 14,291 working codes that day, saving our users a combined total of $4.2 Million.
The Architecture of Chaos
To handle this load, we had to throw out the rulebook. We didn't just scale vertically. We didn't just scale horizontally. We scaled diagonally. (Don't ask our engineers what that means, they haven't slept in 4 days).
// Actual code snippet from our load balancer
const shouldScale = () => {
if (cpu_usage > 99%) {
deployMoreServers();
prayToTheServerGods();
}
}
The Aftermath
We survived. Barely. Next year we're buying more servers. Or maybe just one giant server the size of a building. We haven't decided yet.
Stay tuned for more updates, and keep hunting those deals. 🎯