Dec 23, 2024
by Humera

The holiday season has arrived, bringing with it the customary frenzy of consumers rushing to purchase last-minute gifts. Infrastructure management throughout the holiday season is an essential component of any IT administrator's work. We expect this will be your most hectic season. Rest assured; you can rely on our advice and support. This blog aims to assist you with infrastructure management throughout the holiday season by providing the best recommendations. No matter your level of experience as an administrator, you will find something useful here; we will begin with the fundamentals and go to more complex techniques. Regardless of your industry, be it SaaS, PaaS, or eCommerce, you must possess IT skills.

The relevance of holiday initiative

Apps built for the cloud nowadays must have a plan to ensure availability at all times. For infrastructure management, this is of utmost importance throughout the holiday season. It is in your best interest for the many people that visit your site or shop to have a positive experience.

  • Reduce customer and company attrition

A few minutes of downtime can cost hundreds of dollars. Customers may choose to shop elsewhere or never return if they are unable to complete a purchase on your site. Customers like that won't buy anything while they're there, and they might never come back.

  • Secure yourself from legal action

Legal risks associated with online buying, such as claims of intellectual property infringement, are another incentive to keep your infrastructure up and running throughout the holidays. This provides additional protection against third-party product-related legal difficulties (such as fake goods).

  • Prepare for contingencies

Having a backup plan for long absences from work is also important. A fallback strategy will be in place to keep operations running in the event of an emergency. As an example, you might use a different program or system to serve as a backup for your main one.

  • Ensuring the safety of data

Knowing how susceptible your data is at this time is critical. Making sure your systems are running smoothly and up-to-date with all the latest patches and upgrades is of the utmost importance. No issues should arise during this hectic period if IT administration is proactive. Additionally, it ensures complete security and data protection for your organization.

Important pointers for holiday infrastructure management

Make sure you have a plan to keep your infrastructure and technology stack running smoothly before you go to your neighborhood holiday party or family reunion.

1. Pre-inspection of your equipment and software

Before the holidays, double-check your network configuration in case you wish to add or remove devices. We recommend examining the server's operating system, software, and hardware before the holiday. It is advantageous to examine any recently installed applications. Make sure you back up all your data before you do a data transfer during the holidays. In the event of a mistake, this can help keep data intact.

2. Plan and forecast the required resources

Before the holiday season begins, dedicate some time to planning and forecasting the necessary resource utilization. Plan ahead for the holidays by noting when you anticipate the most traffic and peak times. Do some pre-event testing to make sure your bandwidth can manage the traffic. Be sure to allocate sufficient backup power and additional storage space to support your systems. Ensure that everyone understands the company's holiday protocol, including the acceptable and unacceptable use of business resources. Whether it's reviewing the fundamentals or learning how to use new tools, your staff needs training. Make sure you have adequate people on staff and review your security measures in case there are any new or heightened security concerns. Make preparations for periods of inactivity and keep a contingency plan handy. Lastly, monitor your systems closely during the holiday season and be ready to make any necessary adjustments.

3. Perform load and stress tests on the system

Be sure your systems can manage the surge in visitors expected during the holiday season. That is why, prior to experiencing heavy traffic, it is crucial to conduct load and stress tests on your infrastructure. To evaluate the performance of your systems, load testing mimics actual traffic scenarios. In contrast, the goal of stress testing is to identify possible weak points by subjecting your systems to extreme loads. If you run these tests, you can find and fix flaws before they become major problems. You definitely don't want your online store to fall down during the busiest shopping season of the year.

4. Always have a backup plan

If you anticipate a spike in traffic, it's best to have extra resources ready to go. In the event that your primary server experiences slowdowns or crashes, you may easily switch to the secondary data center. It is essential to explore methods for augmenting your resources. More servers or better ones might be required for this. Plan ahead for infrastructure management during the holidays, if necessary, to avoid unexpected challenges.

5. Complete application and infrastructure monitoring

Observability provides comprehensive insight into your system. This method lets you spot problems before they happen and fix them right away. Since there is greater traffic and activity during the holidays, complete monitoring is vital. Unfortunately, this could lead to an increase in the frequency of negative incidents. If you monitor everything closely, you can swiftly resolve any arising problems.

6. Set up database auto-growth for data files

For those who aren't familiar, "auto-growth" refers to a database's ability to automatically allot additional space when necessary. Maintaining the space and safety of databases is crucial due to their constant operation. To set up auto-growth, follow these steps:

  • Launch SQL Server Management Studio and go to the database.
  • The "Properties" tab should be clicked.
  • Next, go to the "Options" page.
  • Keep scrolling until you reach the "Auto Grow" part.
  • Ensure that the "Database" and "Log" files have the "Enabled" setting as the final step.
  • It's done! Completing this crucial task will ensure that your databases can handle the increase in holiday traffic.

7. Use microservices and containerized applications

We highly recommend applying microservices and containerized apps throughout the holiday season. Using these two technologies together, you may fortify your IT system against interruptions and outages. Splitting a large program into smaller, more manageable services is possible with the help of microservices and software architecture. This approach enhances both the availability of your applications and the pace at which you can release updates and new features. One further approach to making your IT infrastructure more resilient is to use containerized apps. By encapsulating an app along with all of its dependencies, containers make it simple to deploy and execute in any environment. This might make it less likely for people to make mistakes when deploying updates and cut down on the time it takes to get back online after an outage.

8. Evaluate regulations of container migration and restarting

Make sure your procedures for container migration and restart are solid before the holiday shopping season begins. You should review your container migration policies previously. Ensure their efficiency and timeliness, as this will determine the movement of your containers. Examine your policies regarding container restarts next. It is crucial to ensure that a container restarts without any issues. Both plans are essential to keep your IT operating smoothly and generating revenue during the holiday season.

9. Verify cutoffs and autoscale regulations

Be careful with your autoscale policies and thresholds if you're utilizing cloud-based autoscaling. Avoid performance problems caused by excessive scaling in your system. By closely monitoring your system over the holidays, you can make any necessary changes. If everything is in order, though, you can enjoy the holidays without worrying about how your IT system will cope with the surge in visitors.

10. All the notifications must be set up properly

Managing infrastructure throughout the holidays isn't complete without alerts. The moment a problem arises in your system, you should receive notifications. That is why getting their configuration right is crucial. We recommend integrating PagerDuty with SMS for critical notifications and using Slack or email for ordinary warnings.

11. Authentic user tracking

The Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool lets you watch what people do on your computer in real time. Similar to Google Analytics, RUM collects data from agents at the user level instead of the server level. RUM can capture the actions of a user logging into your application or attempting to access sensitive data, providing you with insight into network activity and its impact on company processes.

12. Modify policies for traffic routing

Changing the routing policies of your servers is another approach to enhance infrastructure management over the holidays. If your web servers are behind a load balancer, for instance, you can restrict access to them to requests sent by local clients by changing the default route to an internal IP address. With most traffic coming from within your network rather than external sources, you can lessen the likelihood of an unexpected outage.

13. Make sure your code is error-free

Code optimization is another option. There can be critical coding errors that require immediate attention if you make any modifications to your website during the holidays. So, before you go on vacation, make sure everything is working properly by checking every single line of code.

14. Avoid late untested changes

Maintaining your IT infrastructure during the holidays doesn't necessitate hasty last-minute adjustments. Due to the holiday season, you may have to make last-minute modifications, but testing them completely after time can cause delay. Test all updates before they go live, or at least include them in your regular testing.

15. A system for monitoring distributed uptime

Distributed monitoring solutions are another line of defense to keep your infrastructure online and running well over the holidays. In order to prevent problems from spreading, these solutions let you monitor all of your servers in different regions and provide you real-time notifications when something goes wrong. Your company can avoid downtime by using these technologies.

Last remarks

First and foremost, keep in mind that your IT infrastructure is always on, twenty-four hours a day. Don't let your IT infrastructure go stale during the holidays; doing so could lead to lost productivity, data, and downtime, none of which anyone wants. Take advantage of the holiday season to get ahead on important maintenance and facilities jobs so your business is prepared for the opportunities and challenges that will surely come in 2025, regardless of how busy or shut down it is.