Prepare for high traffic events

  • This guide helps you prepare your Server-side Tag Manager deployment for high-traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday to avoid downtime.

  • Reserve cloud resources with your provider by increasing minimum instances for serverless solutions or creating reservations for VMs and Kubernetes.

  • Set appropriate max instance limits and review quotas to handle expected and unexpected traffic, requesting quota increases beforehand if needed.

  • Upgrade to the latest Server-side Tag Manager Docker image before the event to minimize deployments and restarts during the peak period.

  • Google Tag Manager and Google Cloud implement safeguards during peak shopping events, such as freezing code changes and pausing infrastructure updates to ensure stability.

This document is intended to help you manage your Server-side Tag Manager deployment when you're expecting spikes in cloud resource usage across cloud providers. For example, this document can help you prepare for upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events.

Recommendations

While your server resources may not be affected, we recommend taking the following actions to ensure that you don't experience server downtime in the event of cloud provider outages or resource constraints, regardless of where you deploy Server-side Tag Manager:

  • Work with your cloud provider to reserve capacity for the upcoming event.
    • For serverless solutions, such as Google Cloud Platform's App Engine or Cloud Run, increase your minimum number of instances to your expected or forecasted usage between the event trough and peak. Ideally, set this number at the peak, but at a minimum, consider using your trough.
    • For VMs, Kubernetes, or other solutions, create reservations to ensure resources during any burst in demand.
  • Ensure your max instance limits are set appropriately. The limit should be high enough to handle both expected and unexpected traffic.
  • Review quotas and limits. Make sure that the resources your service uses and relies on have appropriately set quotas. If you want larger quota limits, make those requests before the event.
  • Upgrade your Server-side Docker image version to the latest version before the event so you can limit deployments and instance restarts during the event.

Frequently asked questions

How does Google protect me during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

By scaling for high traffic events, you ensure your site can handle increased traffic. Without enough servers, hits will be lost and data won't be retrievable.

Google Tag Manager freezes all code changes and infrastructure restarts during the duration of Black Friday and Cyber Monday events.

Google Cloud pauses infrastructure updates, automated upgrades, deployments, and lifecycle terminations during the duration of Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. Instances that are running should continue to run to their full lifetimes unless they crash or are interrupted by you.

What events should I prepare for?

  • For Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we recommend preparing for one week before Thanksgiving and two days after Cyber Monday.
  • For end of year events, we recommend preparing for one week before Christmas and one day after New Years.