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Another Black Friday, Another eCommerce Meltdown

Michelle McLean

Black Friday. Retailers know it's coming every year, and still – every year – someone has a spectacular failure. This year Macy's gets top billing – asking customers to wait to shop. Since 500 milliseconds of web delay is estimated to cost 5% of revenue, how much can we guess Macy's lost by asking EVERY shopper, for hours, to wait to shop? It's clearly in the millions of dollars. And how many of those who clicked over to Nordstrom's or Kohl's in frustration will just keep shopping on those other sites?



 
So what did Macy's get wrong? Scaling infrastructure for big traffic increases is fairly easy across most technology areas. Organizations know how to scale WAN links, network infrastructure, and web servers. So what did Macy's miss? Likely, the database.

"You have handle 5x to 15x your usual traffic on Black Friday," says Craig Thayer, CTO of Sazze, parent company to numerous eCommerce websites including Black Friday FM. "Turns out the database is the hardest part of the infrastructure to scale fast, because you have to also make application changes. You change the code, iterate, test, rinse and repeat."
 
Often, when you can't reach a site or app during a busy time, it's the database that has hit a wall. Organizations of all sizes these days are rushing to take advantage of additional capacity in modern databases. Microsoft is pushing its SQL Server 2016 launch, and the open source world is embracing MySQL 5.6. Both modern databases offer more capacity and better failover, aimed at improving application uptime.

The challenge for organizations, as Sazze's Thayer points out, is that applications have to know how to talk to those databases. That takes time – and can't be done in rapid response in the middle of a Macy's meltdown during Black Friday. It's got to be done in advance.
 
Organizations have a couple choices for how to adopt these databases. They can recode their apps – teaching those apps how to send some traffic to additional database servers to spread out the load. Or they can use technology like they have for their web server farms – load balancing technology – in front of their databases and have that software redirect the database load automatically. The benefit of using database load balancing software is that it avoids the application recoding – and subsequent "rinse and repeat" cycles that Sazze's Thayer is keen to avoid. So that option can often be implemented faster than recoding an app and provides additional benefits such as seamless failover.

Black Friday often serves as a warning for the rest of the December online shopping spree. The hope is that companies that experienced – or watched others have – a Black Friday meltdown can scale their infrastructure in time to be ready for that holiday shopping traffic.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

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Another Black Friday, Another eCommerce Meltdown

Michelle McLean

Black Friday. Retailers know it's coming every year, and still – every year – someone has a spectacular failure. This year Macy's gets top billing – asking customers to wait to shop. Since 500 milliseconds of web delay is estimated to cost 5% of revenue, how much can we guess Macy's lost by asking EVERY shopper, for hours, to wait to shop? It's clearly in the millions of dollars. And how many of those who clicked over to Nordstrom's or Kohl's in frustration will just keep shopping on those other sites?



 
So what did Macy's get wrong? Scaling infrastructure for big traffic increases is fairly easy across most technology areas. Organizations know how to scale WAN links, network infrastructure, and web servers. So what did Macy's miss? Likely, the database.

"You have handle 5x to 15x your usual traffic on Black Friday," says Craig Thayer, CTO of Sazze, parent company to numerous eCommerce websites including Black Friday FM. "Turns out the database is the hardest part of the infrastructure to scale fast, because you have to also make application changes. You change the code, iterate, test, rinse and repeat."
 
Often, when you can't reach a site or app during a busy time, it's the database that has hit a wall. Organizations of all sizes these days are rushing to take advantage of additional capacity in modern databases. Microsoft is pushing its SQL Server 2016 launch, and the open source world is embracing MySQL 5.6. Both modern databases offer more capacity and better failover, aimed at improving application uptime.

The challenge for organizations, as Sazze's Thayer points out, is that applications have to know how to talk to those databases. That takes time – and can't be done in rapid response in the middle of a Macy's meltdown during Black Friday. It's got to be done in advance.
 
Organizations have a couple choices for how to adopt these databases. They can recode their apps – teaching those apps how to send some traffic to additional database servers to spread out the load. Or they can use technology like they have for their web server farms – load balancing technology – in front of their databases and have that software redirect the database load automatically. The benefit of using database load balancing software is that it avoids the application recoding – and subsequent "rinse and repeat" cycles that Sazze's Thayer is keen to avoid. So that option can often be implemented faster than recoding an app and provides additional benefits such as seamless failover.

Black Friday often serves as a warning for the rest of the December online shopping spree. The hope is that companies that experienced – or watched others have – a Black Friday meltdown can scale their infrastructure in time to be ready for that holiday shopping traffic.

Michelle McLean is VP of Marketing at ScaleArc.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...