---
title: "How we prepare Shopify for BFCM"
description: "Shopify’s BFCM readiness program addresses the challenge of operating critical commerce infrastructure at traffic levels informed by 2024 records, while preparing APIs with no prior holiday-traffic history. Starting in March, teams combined capacity planning on Google Cloud, an infrastructure roadmap, risk assessments, chaos-engineering Game Days, and a Resiliency Matrix covering failure modes, recovery objectives, runbooks, and on-call coverage. Genghis load tests and Toxiproxy network faults ran across three GCP regions, while five April–October scale tests exercised browsing, checkout, analytics, webhooks, regional failover, and cascading failures; testing reached 146 million requests per minute and a p99 target of 200 million. The work exposed and addressed Kafka partition, memory, timeout, routing, queueing, and failover issues, while the operational plan adds monitoring, 24/7 incident coverage, merchant communications, live tuning, and a post-BFCM review."
---

# How we prepare Shopify for BFCM

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · Nov 20, 2025

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Shopify’s BFCM readiness program addresses the challenge of operating critical commerce infrastructure at traffic levels informed by 2024 records, while preparing APIs with no prior holiday-traffic history. Starting in March, teams combined capacity planning on Google Cloud, an infrastructure roadmap, risk assessments, chaos-engineering Game Days, and a Resiliency Matrix covering failure modes, recovery objectives, runbooks, and on-call coverage. Genghis load tests and Toxiproxy network faults ran across three GCP regions, while five April–October scale tests exercised browsing, checkout, analytics, webhooks, regional failover, and cascading failures; testing reached 146 million requests per minute and a p99 target of 200 million. The work exposed and addressed Kafka partition, memory, timeout, routing, queueing, and failover issues, while the operational plan adds monitoring, 24/7 incident coverage, merchant communications, live tuning, and a post-BFCM review.

## Context

BFCM is Shopify’s most demanding period, with millions of merchants and tens of millions of buyers relying on the platform. The 2025 preparation also had to account for an analytics API layer that launched after the 2024 peak season and therefore had no historical holiday traffic to model.

## Approach / What changed

Shopify combined year-round capacity planning, a multi-region Google Cloud strategy, risk assessments, chaos-engineering Game Days, production-scale load tests, and five large scale tests. Teams used Genghis to simulate user workflows, Toxiproxy to inject network faults, and a Resiliency Matrix to track vulnerabilities, recovery procedures, operational playbooks, and on-call coverage. Findings were addressed through scaling, code and query optimization, Kafka partition increases, memory profiling, timeout tuning, routing changes, and regional failover tests.

## Takeaways

- Five major scale tests ran from April through October; the fourth reached 146 million requests per minute and more than 80,000 checkouts per minute, while the final test used a 200 million requests-per-minute p99 target.
- Analytics Game Days found that data freshness required more Kafka partitions, API memory usage needed optimization, and connection timeouts needed tuning to avoid pool exhaustion.
- Scale testing uncovered checkout queue backlogs, unplanned failover, traffic-routing issues, and delays when restoring regions; the Resiliency Matrix records the resulting fixes and response procedures.

**Tags:** [Google Cloud](https://yomu.fyi/topic/gcp), [Kafka](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kafka), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/bfcm-readiness-2025)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/bfcm-readiness-2025
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T13:18:53.460Z

[Read original post](https://shopify.engineering/bfcm-readiness-2025)