How do you plan for Ramadan + DSF + GITEX peak load?
Dubai’s peak calendar is unlike anywhere else and we plan for all three. Ramadan + Eid al-Fitr (Mar, May lunar, dates shift yearly) drives F&B + fashion + gifting at 15-25× normal load, iftar-time traffic spikes (sunset, ~7 PM GST), suhoor-time spikes (4 AM GST), and Eid-eve jewellery / fashion peaks. DSF (Dubai Shopping Festival, Jan, Feb) drives retail across Dubai Mall / Mall of the Emirates / Outlet Mall tenants. GITEX (Oct) drives B2B (largest tech trade-fair in MENA). Our playbook: pre-warm Cloudflare / Fastly across MENA edges, scale AWS Bahrain RDS read-replicas + ElastiCache 2× baseline, run synthetic checkout monitoring every 60 seconds (Datadog / New Relic), put Telr + NI on dual-rail failover (if one fails Magento auto-switches), pre-fan the FTA VAT cache, and staff a launch-night war-room with PagerDuty rotations. Old release stays warm 72 hours for one-DNS-flip rollback.