Product drops that held at peak

A top global sportswear brand · via Inova IT · Senior backend engineer · May 2020 – Oct 2021

I worked on the microservices behind limited-edition product drops for a top global sportswear brand: up to 2.45M requests per second and 50 Gbps at peak, expanded to 14+ markets.

Context

Limited-edition product drops are the hardest kind of traffic: almost nothing for weeks, then millions of people arriving in the same minute, all trying to buy something there isn’t enough of. Through Inova IT I worked as an external engineer on the team that ran the drop platform.

The challenge

Keep the platform fast and fair at peaks of up to 2.45 million requests per second and 50 Gbps, while expanding it to more markets.

Approach

• Service communication: optimised how the team’s microservices talked to each other, which is where much of the latency and load at peak came from.
• Expansion: extended the platform to 14+ markets worldwide, integrating internal and external services in each.
• Operations: shared on-call duty, coordinated releases across several teams, and onboarded new engineers.

Outcome

The platform carried drops at up to 2.45 million requests per second and 50 Gbps at peak, across 14+ markets.