Just another (Black) Friday

This post details Vercel's operational readiness for peak traffic events like Black Friday, highlighting platform capabilities in handling massive request volumes (86.7 billion requests, 1.9 million RPS), security defenses (3 billion platform firewall blocks, 519 million WAF blocks), and intelligent serving strategies (background revalidation, request collapsing). It emphasizes built-in observability features for real-time monitoring of cache hit/miss rates, function invocations, and real-user metrics, along with custom query and anomaly alert capabilities. The post also mentions the ability to stream logs, traces, and analytics to external tools via Drains for unified signal streams. It references a customer success story (Helly Hansen) that saw an 80% YoY revenue increase and zero downtime after migrating to Vercel's CDN and performance optimizations.