Problems / Scaling, easy

Black Friday spike

A shop handles 1,500 req/s comfortably. At 10 s, Black Friday traffic triples for 15 seconds.

Free to open. Runs in your browser, no sign-up.

Your goals

Survive the spike: success ≥ 99%, p99 ≤ 500 ms.

The traffic

1,500 requests a second for 30 seconds: 90% reads, 10% writes.

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls API.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
APIApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Redis cache (checked first), Postgres.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 150 slots · timeout 1.0 s
Redis cacheCacheAPI checks it first for reads.An in-memory cache like Redis usually answers in well under a millisecond inside one region.95% hit rate
PostgresSQL databaseAPI reads it when Redis cache misses. API calls it for writes.Postgres runs one process per connection, which is why poolers like PgBouncer sit in front of busy databases.8 vCPU · 60 connections

Hints

Try it first. Open one hint at a time if you get stuck.

Hint 1

Watch the API during the spike.

Hint 2

Size for the peak, not the average.

One way to solve it

Add API replicas until the spike fits (3 → 7 or more).

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