🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The ticket site that goes 10x on sale day
The situation
A concert-ticket site usually runs fine on one beefy server. But the moment a popular tour goes on sale, traffic jumps to ten times normal for about an hour, then drops back. During those spikes the single server is completely swamped — even though it's already one of the biggest machines the cloud rents — and fans get error pages. The team needs to survive these short, huge bursts.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?