Traffic bursts don’t look dangerous at first. Most of the time, dashboards are still mostly green while the system is already drifting toward failure. That’s exactly what kept happening to us.
For a long time, our services behaved predictably. Traffic grew gradually. Autoscaling worked. Latency stayed reasonable. Things felt stable. Then we started seeing short, sharp traffic bursts — often triggered by promotions or external events. Request rates jumped within seconds. Autoscaling never had time to react. What followed became uncomfortably familiar.