This year, we introduced the Live Content infrastructure, the system behind our Live by Default experience and enterprise-grade High-Frequency CDN. This system aims to handle the combined scenario of massive incoming traffic from your audience and the need to publish content updates rapidly.

This is a challenge during high-volume commerce events because while a massive audience is exploring your offers, you often need to change your content regularly. Content changes during massive commerce events like this are usually time-critical for a couple of different reasons, for example:

• Offers are expiring and need to be tucked away.
• Products are out of stock, and their promos must be removed.
• You are optimizing what promotions to feature to bring attention to the most potent offers at any given time.

Serving large audiences efficiently on a CDN depends on caching, but rapid content updates require cache invalidation and fast propagation, creating a tension between speed and flexibility. We solved this with the Live Content infrastructure. One of the key goals we set for this infrastructure was "Black Friday is a Non-Event in 2024."

And I'm happy to tell you it was.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the Super Bowl of e-commerce, where websites are pushed to their limits and engineering teams are on high alert, ready to jump into action at the first sign of trouble. But thanks to our next-gen CDN, Black Friday 2024 was a total snooze fest for Sanity's customers, at least regarding their content infrastructure.

We handled a whopping 8 billion requests with barely a blip on the radar. Our success rate never dipped below 99.999%, averaging an impressive 99.999205% throughout the week. In other words, despite the massive traffic, our customers' customers experienced this as just another ordinary week–only with an elevated rate of great deals.

To be fair, having some issues during Black Friday is, unfortunately, still a common occurrence, so this didn't go unnoticed: Customers have been reaching out in the aftermath to let us know how much they appreciated the solid nature of our CDN (they even used phrases like "tremendously fantastic").

The goal for 2024 was a non-event Black Friday for everyone involved. Next year, the goal is that this is taken for granted. When it happens, though, I might still be telling you about it.

Want to learn more?

We'd love to chat if you're curious about how Sanity's Live Content infrastructure can help your business breeze through high-traffic events like Black Friday. Go to our Sanity Live page for more details on our real-time content platform, or book a demo with our sales team to see it in action.

Let's make your next big event a total non-event – in the best possible way.