How We Scaled and Observed: A Week of Performance Wins in Cloud Infrastructure Management

From Smart Meters to Scaling Chaos: The Big Data Trap

In cloud infrastructure, you rarely get a quiet week — and last week was a textbook case of that. From surprise traffic spikes driven by TV campaigns to building modular observability stacks as code, our team rolled up their sleeves and got deep into the guts of performance tuning and monitoring.

Here’s a look behind the scenes at what we did, what we learned, and what you can take away if you’re building on AWS or managing growing Kubernetes workloads.

From Traffic Spikes to Tuned Systems: The BuyCycle Story

Imagine this: your platform runs smoothly, handling moderate traffic as expected — until a TV ad campaign hits.

That’s exactly what happened to one of our customers.

Suddenly, traffic surged. Autoscaling rules that once looked fine on paper struggled to keep up. Thanks to our observability tools, we quickly noticed warning signs: ProxySQL queues building up, NGINX containers under pressure, and resource requests simply too low.

What we did:

Tuned ProxySQL thresholds to reduce query latency under load.
Adjusted NGINX resource requests and added autoscaling logic.
Most critically, we raised the Kubernetes node group max size from 10 to 80 — ensuring that the system could elastically scale up with demand.

The result? The site didn’t just survive the campaign — it’s now prepared for growth. Performance stabilized, error rates dropped, and scaling became smooth and confident.

This is the kind of real-world pressure test that validates everything we preach: infrastructure must be observant, scalable, and boringly reliable — especially when it’s under the spotlight.

Observability as Code: Shipping Monitoring Like Product Feature

We don’t believe monitoring should be an afterthought.

Last week, we took major steps to treat observability as a first-class citizen in our stack — provisioning and configuring it as code, just like any other infrastructure component.

Highlights:

Deployed Tempo for distributed tracing on the Sela stack, giving teams full visibility into service-to-service performance.
Created and reviewed a modular Terraform Grafana stack — making it easy to spin up Grafana + Prometheus across environments.
Started planning a reusable Grafana module that lets us scale observability setups without reinventing the wheel.

This “monitoring stack as code” mindset means customers don’t wait for dashboards to appear — they’re ready by the time the service is live.

And because it’s all infrastructure-as-code, it’s versioned, reproducible, and consistent.

Smarter Deployments, Smoother Migrations

A good week in cloud infrastructure isn’t just about firefighting. It’s also about steadily removing friction, improving the developer experience, and creating a stronger foundation for what’s next.

Here are a few of the incremental wins we shipped last week:

Optimized container warmup times for post-deployment performance — shaving off latency before the first request even hits.
Implemented health checks for Wagtail CMS instances to improve failover handling and catch regressions earlier.
Started exploring cookie-based and IP-based routing for smart canary releases — critical for safer production rollouts.

These are the kinds of changes that don’t always make headlines, but they compound over time to make infrastructure stable, resilient, and developer-friendly.

Housekeeping That Pays Off

Maintenance isn’t sexy — but it’s vital.

We took time last week to clean up, document, and move infrastructure into a healthier state across multiple customers:

Migrated several Helm and Git repositories to newer, faster runners.
Wrote a README for a Wagtail CMS setup to streamline handoffs and onboarding.
Investigated and resolved 502 errors after a Gunicorn update, ensuring production remained healthy.
Supported an EKS upgrade, ensuring the cluster stays supported, secure, and performance-optimized.

We often say: the best infra is invisible. These changes may not be loud, but they mean fewer surprises, fewer pages, and more confidence across the board.

Lessons Worth Sharing

Here’s what this week reinforced for us — and might for you:

Traffic patterns are unpredictable. Plan for spikes even if you think they won’t happen. Marketing doesn’t always tell you when a TV ad goes live.
Scaling isn’t magic. Autoscaling only works if resource limits and cluster capacity are correctly tuned.
Observability must be built in. If you’re relying on logs and hope, you’re already behind.
Modularity wins. Whether it’s monitoring stacks or deployment logic — what you can codify, you can reuse.

Final Thoughts: Building the Boring, Resilient Cloud

Our mission isn’t to reinvent the wheel. It’s to simplify AWS and Kubernetes for our customers, codify best practices, and bring battle-tested infrastructure as a service — fast, scalable, and safe.

Every week we get to build, test, fix, and improve. But under all that activity is one principle: great infrastructure enables developers to move faster without worrying about what’s underneath.

That’s what we delivered last week. And it’s what we’ll keep delivering — one improvement at a time.

Looking to strengthen your cloud infrastructure’s performance and observability?

Today, you can:

Let’s talk. We’ve done it dozens of times — and we’ll do it faster, simpler, and safer for you.