All case studies

E-commerce · 5 months

From weekly outages to 99.99% uptime in one quarter

An SRE-led turnaround restored customer trust and unlocked the engineering team to ship features again.

Headline result

99.99%

achieved availability

The challenge

A fast-growing DTC retailer suffered weekly production outages, four-hour mean-time-to-resolve, and a demoralized engineering team trapped in firefighting mode. Holiday peak was 90 days away.

Our approach

  • 01Reliability assessment: SLO definition, error budget policy, and on-call structure
  • 02Top-five incident driver remediation in the first 30 days
  • 03Observability rebuild on Datadog with meaningful, tuned alerting
  • 04CI/CD overhaul: trunk-based delivery, progressive rollouts, and automated rollback
  • 05Capacity and load testing for the holiday peak — passed at 4× normal traffic

Results

Measurable outcomes.

99.99%

achieved availability over a 12-month rolling window

82%

reduction in MTTR (from 4h to 12 min)

increase in deployment frequency

$0

lost holiday revenue (vs. $1.3M previous year)

Technologies

AWSKubernetesDatadogGitHub ActionsArgoCDPagerDuty

Our team got their nights back. That alone changed everything else.

James O'Brien

Director of Engineering, Northstar Commerce

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