Diwali / Dussehra / EOSS peak-season readiness, how do you plan for it?

This is the make-or-break moment for any Indian merchant. The pattern: traffic 5-15× baseline from Navaratri start (typically Sep-Oct) through Diwali (Oct-Nov), with a second peak at EOSS (End-of-Season Sale, Jan-Feb for fashion / textile / Surat-saree segments). Our 8-week pre-Diwali playbook: (W-8) load-test on AWS Mumbai with k6 / Apache JMeter at 10× baseline RPS, identify DB / Redis / OpenSearch bottlenecks; (W-6) upgrade EC2 instance class + add ElastiCache Redis cluster + enable Varnish; (W-4) Hyvä LCP audit on Jio 4G, image lazy-load, critical-CSS inline, defer GTM; (W-2) Razorpay / PhonePe / Paytm sandbox load-test, ensure UPI fallback to card on aggregator timeout; (W-1) war-room days at GIFT City / on-site at your office for cutover rehearsal; (Launch night) on-call till 2 AM IST, post-launch coverage for 14 days including all Diwali festival days. Diwali is non-negotiable, we plan for it 8 weeks out, not 2.