Keeping ASOS online through 3.5 million Black Friday page views
Continuous performance testing gave the £3bn fashion retailer the confidence to scale without breaking...
The challenge
ASOS, the UK's largest online fashion retailer, needed:
- A geo-distributed microservices architecture on Azure able to scale across 16 million active customers.
- A mature performance testing capability to support 1,000+ releases a year.
- Confidence the platform could handle Black Friday-level demand without failure.
Our approach
- A production-like test environment, scaled to full peak levels and built from real workload models.
- Continuous performance testing at service and end-to-end level, including weekly peak load tests and scheduled resiliency scenarios.
- Operational levers built into services, so the platform keeps taking orders even under strain.
Impact
- A platform proven to handle 1.9 million orders on Black Friday, with product APIs peaking at 3,500+ requests per second.
- A culture where performance and resilience are built into every team's lifecycle.
Read the full case study
Find out what it takes to keep the UK's largest online fashion retailer online at peak, from re-architecting for scale to coaching developers to test their own work.
The full two-page case study walks through the strategy, the approach and the results in detail.
1.9 million orders processed on Black Friday
3,500+ requests per second at peak
16 million active customers supported
"To run a highly scalable, resilient e-commerce site at peak, you have to build performance and resilience into every slice of your development lifecycle and every team, testing to the point where you're actively trying to break the system before your customers ever do."
Cat Smith, Head of Reliability Engineering, ASOS
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