Rebuilding a marketplace to survive festival-sale traffic

The problem

The platform's single-server architecture went down during three consecutive festival sales, each time losing a full day of peak-season revenue. Average page load time during normal traffic was already a sluggish 4.8 seconds.

Our approach

• 01Split the monolith into catalog, cart, and order services so a spike in checkout traffic didn't take down product browsing.
• 02Moved product images to a CDN with WebP/AVIF delivery and added server-side rendering for product pages to cut load time.
• 03Added horizontal auto-scaling on the checkout service ahead of scheduled sale events, based on historical traffic data.
• 04Ran a full load test simulating 22x normal traffic before the next major sale.

Stack used