How Orbit Commerce kept shipping through peak season
A retail platform deployed more than 100 times during its busiest week of the year without a minute of downtime.
Results
The busiest week of the year
- Deploys in peak week
- Up from zero under the old code freeze.
- Downtime
- 0 min
- Across checkout, search, and inventory.
- Regions
- Serving shoppers close to where they are.
The challenge
Orbit Commerce runs storefronts for hundreds of retail brands. Every year the team froze code for six weeks around the holidays, because a bad deploy during peak traffic could take checkout offline for every merchant at once.
The freeze kept the site up, but urgent fixes waited weeks and features slipped into the new year.
The solution
Checkout, search, and inventory moved to zero-downtime deploys with health checks on every release. New instances start, pass their checks, and take traffic before old ones drain, and a failed check rolls the release back on its own.
Autoscaling handles the traffic peaks in three regions, and preview environments let merchants test seasonal changes before they go live.
The results
For the first time, there was no code freeze. The team shipped 120 deploys in the busiest week of the year with no downtime, and merchants got their seasonal features on schedule.
“We used to freeze code for the whole holiday season. This year we shipped fixes and features during the busiest week we have ever had.”
