Why Do Large Ecommerce Sites Go Down?

Enterprise commerce businesses typically rely on a complex microservices architecture, from fulfillment, to website security, ability to scale with holiday traffic, and payment processing - there is a lot that can go wrong and impact revenue, damage customer trust, and consume engineering time. If an ecommerce site isn’t 100% online and performant, it’s losing revenue.

The holiday season is especially demanding for SREs working in ecommerce. Even the most skilled engineering teams can struggle to keep up with the demands of peak holiday traffic (i.e. Black Friday and Cyber Monday). Just going down for a few seconds can mean thousands in lost revenue, but for some sites, downtime can be exponentially more expensive.

Amazon is an innovator in the space of Chaos Engineering. Their skilled engineering teams designed the Amazon.com site to be resilient to failure, because a second of downtime for Amazon.com is worth more than a second of downtime for the top 25 traditional ecommerce retailers.

Engineering teams can’t afford to sit around and wait for systems to fail. By taking a cue from Amazon, and building for resilience, engineering and devops teams can minimize the risk of downtime in even the most high traffic, mission critical scenarios so the site stays up and running and customers stay happy.