Surviving your First Big Customer as a Startup
summary
A rapid growth case where a flights API with megabyte XML searches and often hitting multiple airlines scales up in a week: a production clone is load tested (not mocked), observability (logs, metrics, tracing) exposes hotspots, and capacity planning reveals a single-row DB contention and third‑party rate limits; the team wrote a custom load tester, defines SLIs/SLOs, applies concurrency limits and used Regulator for backpressure, and deploys repeatable recipes so the system survives.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Start
- 0:54The Excitement of the First Big Customer
- 2:56Procrastination
- 6:23The Goal of every Startup Is To Grow
- 13:28Can Our System Actually Handle this Traffic
- 14:14Load Testing
- 17:37Load Testing Client
- 19:46To Calculate the Capacity of Your System
- 19:58Critical Endpoint
- 21:30The Issues That You Might Come across while Load Testing
- 23:44Structured Load Testing
- 27:15Scaling Safely
- 27:49Service Level Indicators
- 33:31Concurrency
- 38:52Rate Limits
- 40:27Observability
- 42:41When Doing the Load Test How Did You Manage the Third Party Api Request Did You Mock All those Requests
- 46:16Did It Match the Capacity of the Production System
- 52:47How Did You Set Limits to the System Did You Use a Library like a Regulator or Did You Develop
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