Scaling for Seasonal or Event-Driven Traffic
Issue #103: System Design Interview Roadmap • Section 4: Scalability
When Black Friday Meets Your Architecture
You're sipping coffee at 11:58 PM on Thanksgiving when your phone explodes with alerts. Black Friday has begun, and your e-commerce platform is experiencing 50x normal traffic. The difference between systems that gracefully handle this surge and those that crumble isn't just about adding more servers—it's about understanding the temporal nature of demand and architecting for predictable unpredictability.
What We'll Build Today
Today we'll construct an intelligent traffic scaling system that demonstrates four critical patterns: predictive auto-scaling based on historical patterns, queue-based request smoothing for traffic spikes, circuit breaker protection during overload, and real-time observability for capacity planning. You'll witness how Netflix handles 230 million users binge-watching during holiday weekends and why their approach differs fundamentally from Amazon's Prime Day strategy.
[Traffic Pattern Architecture - Shows the complete system with predictive scaling, queue management, and circuit breakers]