Imagine this: A TikTok video of your product goes viral overnight, and suddenly thousands of eager shoppers flood your online store. Or it's Cyber Monday and your flash sale traffic skyrockets. These kinds of spiky workloads – sudden surges in user activity – are the new normal in retail.
Whether it's an influencer drop, a holiday rush, or a competitor's outage sending their customers your way, retailers must be ready to ride massive traffic waves at a moment's notice. The stakes are high: Downtime or slow performance immediately kills conversions, turning excited buyers into frustrated drop-outs.
The High Stakes of Sudden Spikes
"Traffic surges are not rare events – they're routine, and increasingly unpredictable in their intensity," says Shannon Dew, Principal Sales Engineer for Cockroach Labs. "We've seen it play out at massive scale: During the Taylor Swift ticket sales debacle, 14 million fans and bots generated 3.5 billion requests, overwhelming Ticketmaster's systems. Black Friday and Prime Day can bring similar chaos."
"e-commerce retailers know the pattern: Any outage or slowdown can cost millions," Dew continues. "Every millisecond counts – conversion rates plummet when pages load slowly or fail at checkout. Customers bounce immediately, and brand reputation takes a hit that can last far beyond the event."
B2C architects and IT leaders know what’s at stake. They share a customer-obsessed mindset: Keep the e-commerce customer experience fast, seamless, and always on. Their challenge? Building infrastructure that scales up for big events, then scales back down to control costs afterward.
Why Traditional Scaling Falls Short
"To prepare for surges, some teams over-provision resources, running far more infrastructure than needed 90% of the year," observes Ron Nollen, Senior Staff Sales Engineer for Cockroach Labs. "Others freeze all deployments during the holiday season, trading agility for safety. And some try to predict demand and scale just-in-time — which is a risky move if spikes exceed expectations."
Sharding is another traditional fix: splitting databases into separate silos to manage load. However, sharding is operationally brittle. "It introduces complexity, increases engineering overhead, and can still result in hotspots or failures," says Nollen.
"Even modern autoscaling tools have limits. Cloud providers like AWS may throttle capacity during high-demand events, even for enterprise customers. That means retailers can still find themselves stuck—unable to scale up quickly when it matters most." (While CockroachDB’s Advanced clusters provide powerful scalability, they do not currently auto-scale for spiky workloads.)
To meet the moment, retail systems must scale elastically in both directions, stay available and performant under pressure, deliver consistent, real-time data across regions, and operate without manual intervention during surges. This is where distributed SQL databases enter the picture.
Distributed SQL: Built for Spikes
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database purpose-built for handling spiky workloads. It combines the scale-out capabilities of NoSQL with the consistency and familiarity of SQL.
For retailers using CockroachDB like Booking.com, Faire, and Landmark Group, distributed SQL provides the foundation to scale confidently. During high-activity events like major sales CockroachDB’s distributed architecture can handle large traffic increases by scaling out across nodes — then scaling back down afterward to optimize costs. There's no need for complex sharding logic or application rewrites.
Distributed SQL brings several critical advantages to retailers facing traffic spikes. “CockroachDB’s elastic scaling capability allows businesses to add nodes to handle peak traffic and remove them afterward, with the system rebalancing automatically,” says Dew. “High availability comes from built-in replication that ensures no single point of failure — even during a node or region outage, applications stay online and customers can keep shopping.”
“Low latency is achieved by locating data near end users, significantly reducing lag and improving the shopping experience globally,” Dew continues. “In CockroachDB, strong consistency through ACID-compliant transactions ensures real-time accuracy for orders, payments, and inventory. This prevents the costly errors that can occur during high-volume periods.”
Real-World Confidence
A leading food delivery platform uses CockroachDB to power millions of transactions per day. Their engineering team relies on distributed SQL to maintain consistency and uptime, even under high-concurrency loads.
A global cosmetics company is consolidating its many brand websites into a unified, scalable platform. With a sprawling eCommerce footprint and surging demand from viral moments (like TikTok-driven sales), CockroachDB is future-proofing their platform to handle both peak seasons and spontaneous spikes.
Booksy, a global booking platform for salons and spas, needed to support surging traffic, geographic expansion, and a microservices architecture. They run mission-critical services, such as their authorization system, on CockroachDB across multiple GCP regions for 99.999% availability.
"These aren't isolated stories," says Nollen. "More retailers are recognizing that distributed systems aren't just a luxury for tech giants — they're a necessity for modern eCommerce."
The Future: Always-On, Always-Ready Retail
Spiky workloads are here to stay. Flash sales, influencer drops, and holiday surges will only grow in frequency and intensity. Success depends on building an infrastructure that doesn't just survive the spike, but thrives in it.
Distributed SQL is how eCommerce retailers:
Scale predictably without sharding or downtime
Serve global customers with low-latency experiences
Ensure payments, orders, and inventory stay correct under pressure
“When it comes to high availability,” Dew says, “it’s not just about handling traffic; profitable performance means delivering seamless customer experiences when it matters most.”
Ready for Your Next Spike?
Want to ensure your next big sales day is your best yet? Retailers are future-proofing their stack with CockroachDB.
Explore our retail solutions, download our inventory management guide, or talk with an expert to see why CockroachDB is how to scale and stay resilient.
