CTO Antonio Silveira shares the rigorous process to prepare our platform in anticipation for the busiest shopping season of the year.

The lead-up to BFCM is always a really exciting and stressful time. And it makes sense, reports have been coming out weekly for months now, telling us what we can expect this shopping season. 

Macro concerns have had people on the edge of their seats around what to expect this year. Recent reports suggest that this will be one of our strongest holiday seasons yet. 

As you’ve been getting ready for the most important marketing moment of the year, so have we. 

Our team has years of experience preparing for and executing a smooth BFCM for our customers, who rely on us to deliver, and we do it year after year. Here’s what we’re doing now, and how we’re factoring in new opportunities.

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What is our team doing to ensure customers have a smooth BFCM?

BFCM is the most critical weekend and week for brands. This period can be a make-or-break for hitting your annual targets. We need to be there, fully supportive, with systems that perform consistently. Our role is to drive significant business for the brands we partner with, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Our preparations start as early as August. It's a complex process that involves verifying every component of our platform. Attentive's platform is intricate, with numerous moving parts that all need to function seamlessly. We preemptively upscale our systems to handle the anticipated traffic surge. This means we're ready to execute all workflows our customers need so that they can send all of their messages to their consumers, without any warm-up period.

In 2024, we launched several new products, like AI Journeys and AI Pro, which bring new patterns of scale we didn’t have last year. Our teams have been working diligently to test and harden these new offerings. This includes our AI products and data platforms. 

Since each product behaves differently, we've added a lot of capacity to manage these differences. For example, for AI Journeys we're ready to handle more than 30 times the load we had in September. It's a massive undertaking, but we're up to the challenge.

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How are we thinking about building resilience and monitoring?

One of our key focuses is adding resilience to every part of our platform to ensure it can withstand the challenges of BFCM. To achieve this, we have full-on proactive monitoring of all our systems in place. Our team will be all hands on deck, not just during the weekend but also in the days leading up to and following Cyber Week.

We've updated and created new runbooks to help us quickly detect and remediate any issues that may arise. These runbooks are designed to guide us through potential problems, ensuring we can resolve them swiftly in partnership with our Customer Success team. 

Additionally, for the weeks leading up to BFCM, we increase the rigor and verification for every new code change that gets deployed in production. This means we reduce the risk of introducing unexpected bugs during this critical period.

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What goes into load testing?

Load testing is an extensive process that involves stress testing every single component of our platform. Using business intelligence and historical data, we calculate how much additional traffic we can expect, sometimes up to five times our regular load. The change in volume during BFCM can be dramatic—some systems see up to 10x more load. Therefore, scaling and preparation are crucial. Every year, we hit new highs with our customers, and we need to be ready for that.

We test each component individually to ensure it can handle the increased load. This includes everything from our messaging ‌infrastructure to our data processing pipelines. We leave no stone unturned in our quest to ensure everything is ready for BFCM.

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How do we scale the platform for BFCM? 

Our mission is to build and scale our platform focused on achieving the outcomes that benefit our customers. We handle a staggering number of messages, and the volume is massive. To give you an idea, on average, our customers send around 650 million messages in a regular week. Last year, our customers sent over 2.2 billion messages during Cyber Week. 

We see a significant increase in requests for creatives and tag events. We capture a lot of consumer data on our clients’ behalf, and processing this data quickly is crucial. It's a massive scalability process, and we've been working on it for weeks to ensure we're ready.

Preparing for BFCM truly takes a village. It's not just one team or one product—it's everyone working together towards a common goal of supporting your businesses. We've all been putting in the hours to ensure this weekend goes smoothly and exceeds your expectations. Ultimately, setting you up for successful loyalty-building initiatives with your subscribers. I'm looking forward to being in the trenches with everyone during BFCM, supporting you every step of the way. 

With less than 30 days to go, be sure to check out our 30-Days to Black Friday guide to ensure you’re ready for the big week ahead.