Black Friday 2021 – A bi(OS) Perspective

Introduction

Since bi(OS) serves unicorns and tier-1 retailers across three continents, we have a unique vantage point in experiencing Black Friday (and Cyber Monday), especially as it stresses Cloud Data Platforms.  This Black Friday saw bi(OS) handle 3x more peak load across all tenants, with a near-constant SLA.  A day before, a single data stream for a tenant generated up to 6x the peak load for the entire system.  And bi(OS) delivered without any operator involvement.  Read on to learn more.

Two Black Fridays on a Thursday

Horror stories of Black Friday outages are fading from the news due to cloud elasticity and diligence by DevOps SRE teams. However, no one can prepare for a precursor that is 2x in magnitude from a single tenant and a single data source stream. That is precisely what bi(OS) experienced and it didn’t blink.

No event left behind

We didn’t experience any loss of events;  well, not any more than they were the week before.  Also, there was no change in the ingestion success rate from a week ago.  Not only did we not notice any outages, but our customers also experienced no undue slowness.  That’s Telco-grade reliability that bi(OS) delivers for our customers.

But averages are for losers, so we went ahead and measured the spread (p0.01 to p99.99) of request latencies on the non-deterministic cloud. And boy, did it enlighten!. As we said earlier, the cloud is non-deterministic by design, and delivering the above reliability under unplanned duress during this pivotal holiday season gives us immense pride.

Conclusion

bi(OS) experienced 2x Black Friday peak a day earlier, while Black Friday was 3x of usual for many of Isima’s customers.  Not only did no one from our operations team got woken up, our customers experienced the Telco-grade reliability that they have been spoilt with.  And we at Isima like it that way.  Next week, we will explain how bi(OS) comes with built-in observability so businesses can run without a blip.  Is your data platform ready for a 2x Black Friday peak a day sooner?