Preparing Shopify for Black Friday and Cyber Monday - Shopify

This post details Shopify's preparations for the 2018 Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period, highlighting the importance of resiliency planning and operational readiness. Key contributions include: - Describing "game days" as a fault injection technique to test system assumptions by degrading dependencies (e.g., artificial latency to shipping providers) and verifying fallback mechanisms. - Outlining load testing exercises to simulate BFCM traffic volumes and ensure system behavior under stress. - Explaining the implementation of a feature freeze and code freeze to minimize changes and reduce the risk of introducing bugs during peak periods. - Quantifying the success of these preparations by reporting record-breaking sales and system metrics, emphasizing the payoff of proactive risk mitigation and understanding third-party dependencies.