# Black Friday / Peak Retail Readiness Checklist

Use **T-14 / T-7 / T-1** against staging, then production config freeze.

## Edge

- [ ] CloudFront behaviors: static assets long TTL; product HTML short TTL (≈30–60s) only where inventory/price lag is acceptable
- [ ] Origin shield / cache keys exclude session cookies on cacheable paths
- [ ] WAF rate-based rules + bot control tuned on staging with load generator
- [ ] Cache warm: featured SKUs and promo landing pages primed after last deploy

## Compute

- [ ] Predictive or scheduled scale-out 30–60 minutes before email/push send
- [ ] Fargate / ASG min capacity set to soak first spike (do not rely on cold EC2 launch alone)
- [ ] Load test at **150%** of forecast peak; record scale lag and error budget burn

## Data

- [ ] RDS Proxy in front of Aurora/RDS; app pool sizes revalidated under peak concurrency
- [ ] Read replicas / reader endpoints for inventory and reporting; checkout stays on writer
- [ ] ElastiCache (Redis or Valkey) for catalog + cart/session; TTLs documented
- [ ] Connection wait alerts < failure threshold (e.g. alert at 50ms wait, not at 5xx)

## Ops

- [ ] CloudWatch dashboard: p95/p99 latency, cache hit ratio, DB connections, ASG/ECS desired vs running
- [ ] Runbooks for cache miss storm, connection saturation, scale lag — named owners
- [ ] Cost: baseline on Savings Plans / RIs; burst On-Demand (Spot only for interruptible workers)

Sibling architecture: [ecommerce scalability reference](/blog/aws-ecommerce-scalability-reference-architecture-2026/).