How do you plan for Diwali + Karva Chauth + wedding-season peak load?
NCR is India’s biggest peak-season retail market, bigger than Mumbai or Bengaluru by transaction volume during Q3/Q4. Our 8-week pre-Diwali NCR playbook: (W-8) load-test on AWS Mumbai (ap-south-1) or Yotta D1 Noida with k6 / Apache JMeter at 40× baseline RPS (NCR Diwali peaks are higher than national average), 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 from Gurugram + Noida + Faridabad samples (NCR winter air-quality Nov-Feb degrades cell-tower density, we test for it); (W-2) Paytm / Pine Labs / Razorpay sandbox load-test, ensure UPI fallback to card on aggregator timeout; (W-1) war-room days at Cyber City Gurugram or Noida Sec 62 for cutover rehearsal; (Launch night) on-call till 2 AM IST. NCR also has Karva Chauth (women’s jewellery + ethnicwear spike, Oct/Nov), wedding season (Nov-Feb, jewellery + bridalwear from Karol Bagh / Chandni Chowk), Republic Day (Jan 26 retail), and Eid (Old Delhi / Jamia Nagar). We plan for all five festival peaks 8 weeks out, not 2.