Capacity Planning at Scale - Shopify

What this post added

This post details Shopify's approach to capacity planning for BFCM, including forecasting traffic scenarios with data scientists, creating master resourcing plans for GCP, and tasking resource owners with detailed estimates. It highlights the challenges of planning during uncertain times (e.g., COVID-19) and the decision to scale to aggressive growth scenarios to ensure platform stability. The post also elaborates on the evolution of scalability testing, from historical surprises to regular "faux" BFCM events like "Oktoberfest scale-up", and the use of internal load testing tooling (go-lua) to identify and fix bottlenecks before the actual event.