How Etsy gets its mobile apps ready for peak traffic
Most advice about surviving a traffic spike is about capacity. Scale the fleet, warm the caches, load test the checkout path. All of it assumes you can fix whatever breaks the moment you find it. Mobile apps don’t work that way. I spent an hour on a workshop with Jay Henry, a senior engineering manager at Etsy who owns engineering strategy across three teams covering CI, build, test, release, observe, and SRE. Jay’s take: a web team having a bad day can revert in minutes.