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Preparing for peak trading, bank holidays and deployment freezes in 2023

Throughout the year Poq will have a number of deployment freezes to ensure stabilities of apps at all times especially during peak periods and public holidays.

To ensure that quality and performance remains high regardless of the time of year, below are some key dates and activity to be aware of, and also some guidance on what you can also to do prepare.

🇬🇧🎁 UK Bank holidays

Poq does not work on UK bank holidays and will have small deployment and release freezes to ensure that everything is stable and predictable when we are not in the office. We will continue to have 24/7 monitoring and will react to any Poq caused P1 issues during this time but will not have manned support to react to non-critical issues or client caused issues.

🛠❄️ Deployment and release freezes

There are small deployments and release freezes lined up with UK bank holidays and longer freezes to cover peak trading over black Friday and Christmas periods. Having deployment freezes will control the risk of any unforeseen issues that may arise after a release and ensure the app runs well when traffic may be high but dedicated resource is low.

EventDatesLast DeploymentEarliest deployment
Summer Bank Holiday28 August 202324 August29 August
Black Friday / Cyber Monday24 November, 27 November16 November30 November
Christmas, Boxing day & New Year25 December - 26 December & 1 January14 December2 January 2024

What can you do?

⏰ Align with our freeze times

Often issues arise on the app when changes are made on the client side that links to the app. Please sync up with our freeze dates and don’t make changes to any feed structures, check out URL or any other code or integration that is used for the app’s functionality. If you change anything which goes on to cause an issue while we are in a freeze or over a bank holiday, we won’t be able to resolve it until the earliest deployment day.

📈 Inform us of expected traffic spikes

Please also keep us informed of any sales, marketing campaigns or anything else that is likely to significantly increase traffic. We have auto-scaling set up and also will do manual scaling around Black Friday and Christmas sales, but it is always better to be able to predict and prepare. Please let the Support team aware in your catch-ups.

🇺🇸🎁 US bank holidays

Unless it is also a UK bank holiday, Poq will be working the contracted hours for US bank holidays.

EventDatesLast Deployment
Martin Luther King Jr DayJanuary 16Yes
Presidents’ DayFebruary 20Yes
Memorial DayMay 29Yes
Independence DayJuly 4Yes
Labor DaySeptember 4Yes
Columbus DayOctober 9Yes
Veterans DayNovember 11Yes
Thanksgiving DayNovember 23Yes
Christmas DayDecember 25Yes