Peak Season Archives - bol.com Techlab

Load testing with Locust – Podcast

During the recording of this episode, we are in the week of Black Friday. An exciting week for people hunting for bargains. And also for a lot of our colleagues. Whether that is from a commercial point of view or an engineering one. All the eyeballs on our website, bring a lot of traffic. And consequential a lot of load on our systems. In this episode, we focus on one aspect of preparing for a large load: Load Testing. In this episode, we are going to talk about Load Testing…

How could this happen – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-11-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Resilience devops Engineering Culture Peak Season Learn incident

If you are a regular listener to the podcast or an e-commerce watcher, you know “the season” is very important for us. It is a yearly recurring theme in the podcast. You are probably also aware that uptime and responsiveness of our app and website are crucial. And you might have noticed that enabling our software engineers to perform at their peak is very important for us. Enabling teams and engineers is what we do to build a great place to engineer. And sometimes things just go sour. A perfect…

Our ride to peak season frontend performance

Edwin van der Graaf, on 25-02-2020
Category: Development Tags: Scalability JavaScript Peak Season performance frontend development

We can imagine that at a regular company your colleagues might become very nervous when you worsen the frontend performance by more than a second on the onload, just before the peak season. In this story we’d like to share our journey from experiencing a setback in performance that was caused by us innovating, to the point where we became the retailer with the second fastest frontend response times (Twinkle and Computest benchmark study) in the Netherlands. Before diving into the details, it’s worth mentioning that we as software engineers…

Our ride to peak season frontend performance

Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Peak Season Peak Sinterklaas Santa Claus Black Friday Singles Day Load testing SRE

In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”. During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and…

Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

How we deal with the unexpected

Peter Brouwers, on 8-01-2019
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure Tags: IT Outage Post-Mortem Retro On Call Peak Season

“It didn’t look like a big issue at that moment”. Everybody in the room listened to what the Engineer on Duty (EoD) had to tell about the first moments what, later on, turned out to be a partly outage of the webshop in peak season.