Originally published in Nov 2017, at Onica.com/blog

In 2017, Macy’s® wasn’t the only retail website that was overwhelmed on the biggest shopping day of the year. Old Navy®, GAME®, and Quidco® were also caught unprepared for the high traffic surges and lost sales opportunities in the short and long run.

We have a large distributed system here at Rackspace, which we’re scaling and which currently processes 10 million metrics per minute. Part of the scaling effort required us to switch to using Apache Kafka for our message queues. We’ll be looking at a few possible clients to explore our options and benchmarking their throughput.