Building for Black Friday every day: Continuous resilience as a DevOps superpower

During high-demand events, downtime is one of the most expensive risks in digital operations. Industry studies show that the average cost of downtime exceeds USD 300,000 per hour. Furthermore, during peak retail events like Black Friday, total downtime losses across the industry can reach as high as USD 675 million. 

Whether it’s Black Friday, tax season or a major product launch, every second of downtime costs money, trust and reputation. 

DevOps teams know that resilience isn’t something to test once a year; it’s an everyday challenge. Today’s DevOps environments are sprawling, built across multiple clouds, tools and regions that rarely work in sync. That fragmentation makes maintaining reliability and coordination harder than ever.

Modern DevOps teams must do more than keep the lights on; they must orchestrate reliability and resilience across this complex ecosystem. That means connecting observability, automation and governance into one cohesive operating model that can withstand the chaos of peak demand. 

To stay reliable at scale, modern DevOps teams must build resilience into the delivery process itself—continuously, automatically and by design.

Beyond lost sales, downtime drains productivity, burns out engineers and erodes customer trust. For many cloud-native retailers, the real challenge isn’t just staying online—it’s scaling efficiently. Over-provisioning resources drives up costs, while under-provisioning risks outages. True resilience means balancing performance and cost at every peak moment.

Traditional monitoring solutions provide visibility after something breaks. It shows what went wrong but doesn’t prevent it from happening again. As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become the norm, DevOps teams need more than dashboards; they need insights that drive preventive action and reinforces system resilience before disruption occurs. 

Research shows that software changes carry significant risk. One study found that between 14.5% and 22% of adaptive code commits introduce bugs, which means even routine updates can create unexpected instability.

Retail and commerce platforms running on cloud services like AWS face unique challenges—each code update or configuration tweak can affect load balancing, latency and user experience under pressure. These challenges are the reason why leading DevOps teams turn to continuous verification (CV)—the practice of testing every release in real time against resilience targets and service level objectives (SLOs). 

Continuous verification ensures that new code and configurations meet performance, reliability and compliance baselines before they ever reach production. It shifts teams from reactive troubleshooting to proactive assurance, so issues are caught long before customers notice.

Think of it as a resilience gate, not a speed bump. DevOps teams can move quickly while knowing automation is validating the health of every release behind the scenes. 

Even with the best preparation, unpredictable surges still happen: a flash sale that exceeds forecasts, a new feature that spikes demand or a dependency that fails under load. In those moments, maintaining resilient systems is imperative. 

Maintaining IT resilience depends on anticipating stress points, adjusting capacity proactively and preventing issues before they affect customers. Here’s where AI-driven resilience management changes the game.  

Instead of reacting to failures, resilient systems continuously assess their posture, adapt to shifting conditions and apply automated remediation to keep performance steady and risk contained.

Over time, these systems learn from every event, strengthening their ability to prevent disruptions and maintain reliability across complex environments. It is resilience in motion, an adaptive automation framework that not only strengthens system awareness but continuously improves how it protects itself.  

Building resilience into everyday operations means integrating observability, automation and governance into a continuous feedback loop. It’s about designing for failure, learning continuously and recovering autonomously so downtime becomes the exception, not the rule.

DevOps teams often struggle to orchestrate work across an increasingly fragmented toolchain of multiple services, regions and accounts operating in silos. Each environment generates valuable data, but without a unifying layer of visibility and control, it becomes nearly impossible to act on insights consistently. 

When telco giant Deutsche Telekom implemented IBM Concert®, its patching time fell by 78% per instance, a clear demonstration of how automation can accelerate recovery and reduce risk.

IBM Concert addresses this fragmentation by unifying observability, automation and AI into a single operational control plane. It helps teams orchestrate resilience work seamlessly across AWS, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This helps ensure that every service, deployment and region operates against the same standards for performance, compliance and recovery.

Concert continuously verifies releases against resilience targets, uses AI-assisted workflows to accelerate remediation and provides real-time resilience posture scoring so teams can detect and prevent incidents before they occur.

If your systems can handle Black Friday, they can handle anything.

By combining continuous verification, AI-driven automation and resilience by design, organizations can build systems that stay stable under any load, no matter how unpredictable demand becomes. 

IBM Concert enables DevOps teams to achieve that level of readiness every day, transforming resilience from a reactive process into a proactive, data-driven capability that strengthens performance, reliability and customer trust. Concert® helps DevOps teams orchestrate resilience by unifying fragmented operations, automating preventive actions and strengthening resilience posture at scale.

In today’s always-on world, successful DevOps teams anticipate and adapt. Don’t wait for the next surge or outage to test your limits. Build for Black Friday every day and let intelligent automation keep your business one step ahead.