The Super Bowl commercial produced by The Farmer’s Dog, Forever, was named the winner of the USA Today Ad Meter award, was nominated for an Emmy, and unsurprisingly, caused the largest traffic spike our website had ever seen. We handled the peak load with ease.

Rewind 3 weeks though, and that outcome was far from a foregone conclusion. Our site had recently suffered an outage during a commercial that had about 15% of the viewership projected for the Super Bowl. Like any startup experiencing exponential growth, we had architectural tech debt that posed challenges to general system scalability, and scalability of the applications that serve the signup flow in particular had been neglected.

This is a story of how every function at The Farmer’s Dog came together on a moment’s notice to do what seemed impossible at the time - reshape our system to handle more than 30x it’s previous peak load over a few short weeks. It worked, and we came away as the winners of the super bowl (commercials).

Matt is a Staff Engineer, and the tech lead of the Platform Engineering team at The Farmer’s Dog. Prior to The Farmer’s Dog, Matt worked in a variety of companies and roles, but has always