AlpenRetail GmbH

Situation

Checkout latency and a 14-minute database lock during Black Friday 2025 caused abandoned carts. The merchant calendar required a documented capacity and backup posture before the next campaign, without replacing the Shopware stack.

Environment

Region and placement

eu-central-1; CDN at the edge for static assets

Hosts

6 application nodes, 2 MySQL 8 (primary/replica), 2 Elasticsearch, 1 Redis, 1 worker

Operating systems and runtime

Debian 12; MySQL 8.0; Shopware 6.6

Data stores

640 GB catalogue and order data; object storage for media

Connectivity and access

Public HTTPS via load balancer; databases on private subnets; admin via VPN

Agreed scope

• Daily backup architecture with order-table restore tested before campaign freeze
• MySQL slow-query review and replica use for catalogue search refresh
• 24/7 monitoring through the campaign window with a 24-hour standard SLA thereafter
• Security hardening of admin endpoints and SSH

Work performed

• Moved catalogue reindex off the primary; replica lag stayed under 2 s at 4× baseline traffic in a load test.
• Added covering indexes on order_line and customer_address; checkout p95 fell from 1.4 s to 340 ms in staging replay.
• Configured Percona XtraBackup nightly plus binlog shipping; restored 50,000 orders to staging in 36 minutes.
• Restricted /admin to VPN; rotated leaked staging credentials found in a leftover .env on a worker host.
• Staffed an enhanced watch from 24–30 November 2026 campaign week under the existing Professional contract.

Measured results