The countdown is on - we’re just a week away from Black Friday, meaning that you have already prepared your website to face the traffic demands it will - hopefully - face and surmount. In previous years, we’ve written about getting ready for Black Friday because it has traditionally been a peak-traffic occasion, but it has become common for outages to occur at other random peak-traffic times because there are actually other major, but sometimes predictable, traffic jams. As it happens, major shopping days are no longer limited to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend each year - with the end-of-year shopping season beginning online earlier and earlier, and the biggest stumbling blocks lately happening in the US on Thanksgiving Day itself. 

Two years ago, I wrote an article about how probes work in Varnish (it's a great article - fun, informative... go read it), it covers a lot of ground, but still, it misses one important spot. More precisely, it only focused on how Varnish uses probes to know whether a backend is worth contacting, so today, we are going to look at the other side of the story: how do we tell the rest of the system that Varnish is up and ready to work?

Also, we'll see how to handle maintenance: if you need to get your Varnish node offline, it's annoying to log into all the load balancers to re-configure them; it's easier to just tell Varnish to fail incoming probes until said load balancers take the node out of their pool, and then you can wait for the active connections to end (does it ring a bell?) and then stop Varnish.

Hop on! We'll have a look at different ways of doing it - good and (mostly) bad, to try and understand how to do it and be warned of the various pitfalls to avoid.

We’ve reached that time of year when most e-commerce sites are finishing up their efforts to strengthen and secure their website performance before big holiday shopping kicks off in earnest. The frenzy is unpredictable - and no retailer, big or small, is immune. As more shoppers move online for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, and the shopping season extends to become a season unto itself, there are more unpredictable factors over a longer period of time, meaning that preparation, risk assessment and stress testing are essential. Many different stumbling blocks can get in the way of site performance and, ultimately, of capitalizing on major marketing campaigns you’ve invested in. The bottom line is that you may even alienate customers with your online traffic jam (they went online to avoid the crowds!), keeping them away not only during the holidays but later, too.  

It seems like we’ve been hearing cloud-cloud-cloud for so long already that you’d think we’d be completely saturated by cloud computing by now. And while it has continued its steady growth, there is still capacity for much more. A 2018 IDG study on cloud computing found that while a whopping 73% of companies (and growing) report using at least one of their applications in the cloud, most who are not counted in this number plan to introduce the cloud to their infrastructure within the next year.