Black Friday at The Hut Group
It’s nearly midnight and I’m at my desk. It’s jet black outside, eleven stories above the cold Salford quays. At this time the only staff usually in the office are our diligent 24/7 Global Operations Centre. I’m not a member of the Global Operations Centre team and ordinarily I wouldn’t be in the office, but this isn’t an ordinary day. Today is Black Friday 2019, a day where The Hut Group and its brands will realise up to a month’s worth of revenue in one day.
Sitting in our tech hub in Media City UK, I’m not alone. The office is half-full and there’s a quiet buzz of excited techies. It’s already Black Friday in Asia, but we won’t reach our peak system load until early afternoon in the UK when most time zones are awake and looking for Black Friday deals.
This is the day we’ve been preparing for since the same time last year with almost 12 months of improvements focussed on our Ingenuity web platform and its supporting systems. Spread between two major data centres and numerous ‘edge’ serving locations around the world, we have built our capacity to serve several times our peak load.
Our peak load, quietly whispered in the order of several million requests per minute, has been pushed to the limit over the past two months, where we’ve been relentlessly load testing our systems in isolation and combination. An incredible effort across Tech, this ensures our brands can make sales and our warehouses can deliver products to customers.
My responsibility as Head of Data Engineering is our hybrid cloud systems, transferring data from our privately managed data centres into the public cloud for analytics. My (superstar!) team are split between three shifts, covering all 24 hours of Black Friday. Our regular knowledge sharing sessions ensuring everyone knows what to do.
As we monitor our well-honed dashboards, I fit in a quick game of Mario Kart with my team. Nintendo Switches seem as common as the free Red Bull and we’re making sure it’s a fun night. Our dashboards are stable and I win at Mario Kart. All is well.
My shift won’t end for several more hours, when I’ll enjoy a free breakfast and later on the next shift, champagne to celebrate. Here’s to smashing Black Friday 2019!
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