Black Week at Omnium: The Art of Staying Boring

So it begins

November again.

Black Week and Black Friday are coming up, for us and for many others, the most critical and somehow calmest week of the year.

 

The invisible work

During the year, alongside shiny new features and all the fun stuff, we’re always working on Black Friday stuff: performance, scaling, caching, and making sure the right eggs end up in the right basket (or at least not all in one. Also, the basket is super sturdy).

Most of this work never shows up in release notes. It’s the invisible layer of improvements that makes everything else look effortless, and what keeps the shiny things shiny when the traffic hits.

 

Engineering for boring

The funny thing is that people expect chaos, but we’ve spent a lot of time engineering it away.

That’s really what this week is about: making sure there’s nothing dramatic to report when it’s over.

The best compliment you can get on Black Friday is silence. No alerts, no panic messages, no one noticing how much work went into keeping things boring.

 

When the fire department catches fire

Even with all that preparation, it’s hard not to feel uneasy when the giants stumble.

After the recent AWS and Microsoft incidents, we’re checking a few more things than usual.

 

Azure Front Door going down still stands out.

Kind of like watching the fire department catch fire.

Let’s just say we keep a spare fire extinguisher around.

 

The basket is sturdy, eggs are safe, and the fire extinguisher is ready.

Let’s see how quiet we can keep it this year.