How do you plan for Big Billion Days / Diwali / IPL peak?

This is the make-or-break season for any Bengaluru D2C merchant. The peak pattern: Big Billion Days (Flipkart, Sep-Oct, 7-10 day window) drives traffic across the entire Bengaluru D2C ecosystem, even if you’re not on Flipkart, you ride the wave because everyone’s shopping. Diwali (Oct-Nov) is the second peak. IPL season (Apr-May, especially during RCB home games at Chinnabhairaswamy Stadium) drives spike traffic for sports apparel, accessories, F&B delivery. Our 8-week pre-peak playbook: (W-8) load-test on AWS Mumbai with k6 at 30× baseline RPS, identify DB/Redis/OpenSearch bottlenecks; (W-6) upgrade EC2 instance class + ElastiCache Redis cluster + Varnish; (W-4) Hyvä LCP audit on Jio 4G from Bengaluru and Tier-2 cities, image lazy-load, critical-CSS inline, defer GTM; (W-2) Razorpay / Juspay sandbox load-test, UPI fallback to card on aggregator timeout, Cashfree backup rail; (W-1) war-room days at WeWork Galaxy or your office for cutover rehearsal; (Launch night) on-call till 2 AM IST. We’ve done this for multiple BBD cycles, the playbook works.