6 tips on how Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) can prepare for the reliability challenges of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2021.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Being an SRE is a tough (if rewarding) job on any day of the year. But it’s especially challenging on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the post-Thanksgiving event that has become the biggest online shopping day of the year. We’ll focus on calling it Cyber Monday throughout this guide. And for 2021, Cyber Monday promises to include not just the standard challenges associated with massive spikes in traffic but also a spike in cybersecurity attacks, which the FBI expects to surge in frequency this holiday season. And although security may not be SREs’ main job, they’ll be expected to assist security and DevSecOps teams in confronting the reliability threats that hackers pose. So, those are the problems SREs face heading into Cyber Monday 2021 and beyond. For solutions, let’s take a look at six best practices for managing the reliability and security challenges that loom this holiday season. The first step in preparing for Cyber Monday is evaluating how much stress the holiday is likely to place on the systems you support. Obviously, online retailers — especially those that sell tech products — will face the biggest increase in load during the Cyber Monday shopping surge. Businesses that don’t sell things online are less likely to see a major peak in traffic. That said, the fact that Cyber Monday brings more people online, in general, can increase demand across the board.
