Running High-Traffic Product Drops At Rapha With Tristan Watson Smooth Scaling: System Design For High Traffic podcast

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Running High-Traffic Product Drops at Rapha with Tristan Watson

3d ago 46:40

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In this episode, seasoned platform engineer Tristan Watson shares his learnings from handling peak traffic at Rapha and Booking.com. Tristan reveals the key challenges, trade-offs, and best practices involved in preparing infrastructure for high-traffic product drops and collaborations. Whether you're navigating traffic surges or optimizing for resilience, Tristan’s advice will help you prepare your systems to handle the pressure.

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This episode´s guest is Tristan Watson. Tristan Watson has spent over a decade mastering the art of keeping websites fast, stable, and scalable. With experience leading teams and steering key projects across tech, retail, and finance he consistently balances technical excellence with business goals. His pragmatic approach and passion for emerging tech like AI make him a sought-after consultant. Off the clock, you’ll find him exploring new tech trends or out on a bike ride. You can find Tristan on LinkedIn here.

Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. Each week, he’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that perform at scale.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

(00:00) - Intro
(00:58) - Tristan's journey
(02:47) - Differences in scalability
(08:08) - Differences in traffic peaks
(11:12) - The challenges of an SRE team
(16:34) - High stakes make the most memorable moments
(19:39) - The Rapha system setup in more detail
(26:24) - Iterating - anticipating problems or learning from mistakes
(27:57) - The alternatives on the table
(29:30) - Uncertainty in the reliability of the current systems
(30:59) - The virtual waiting room
(33:13) - Experience during the drop
(37:03) - The best moments are with great partners
(40:00) - Main learnings from Product drop
(42:04) - Rapid Fire Questions
(46:07) - Outro