Affirm’s Infrastructure Event Readiness Advice for E-Commerce Startups

From unanticipated service failures to load-related performance degradations, infrastructure event readiness planning is critical for handling seasonal traffic spikes gracefully and dynamically. Without proper preparation, your best sales day could become your last. Gain insights into how Elaine Arbaugh, Senior Software Engineer and SRE tech lead, at fintech startup Affirm managed the massive influx of activity during the 2018 Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday shopping weekend by building a scale-up, fault tolerant, database system that was able to handle 5x a normal day’s scale. Arbaugh provides a suggested infrastructure planning timeline for startups, discusses considerations you should start making now, shares general design principles, and offers tips on how to recover in the event of a database system failure.