# How to Pre-Scale for Black Friday: Step by Step

> How to Pre-Scale for Black Friday. A practical walkthrough with ZopNight: read-only setup, production excluded by default, reversible at every step.

Source: https://zop.dev/learn/how-to/pre-scale-for-black-friday
Published: 2026-07-01 · Author: avinash-gaurav · Tags: zopnight, how-to, learn

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Step-by-step guide to pre-scaling AWS ASG, ECS, GCP MIG, and Azure VMSS for Black Friday traffic spikes using ZopNight Event Readiness.

This is the practical version, the one you can follow in a single sitting. It starts read-only, touches no production resource by default, and every step is reversible, so there is no point at which you are committed to something you cannot undo. Budget about 20 minutes. Before you start you will want: Cloud accounts connected; Autoscaler policies on the targets you want to scale; A ZopNight account with Event Readiness enabled.

## The steps

1. Open Event Readiness and create a draft.
2. Pick scaling targets.
3. Choose multiplier or expectedRequests.
4. Review the cost estimate and DB impact.
5. Schedule the event.
6. Monitor and complete.

## Why this is safe to do today

The reason this is a low-stakes change is that nothing here is destructive. Scheduling stops and starts resources; it never deletes them, and your data persists across a stop exactly as it does across a normal reboot. Production is excluded by default, actions run in dependency order, and every state change is logged with what triggered it.

If you want the fuller context behind this task, the [FinOps](https://zop.dev/learn/finops) guide covers where it fits, and the [AWS EC2 scheduling](https://zop.dev/zopnight/aws/ec2) page shows the same loop applied to a specific resource.

## Getting started

Getting started is intentionally low-stakes:

- Connect your cloud provider with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage.
- Let ZopNight discover your non-production resources and review exactly what it found, filtered by account, region, and status.
- Create a schedule in your timezone and attach the non-production resources or groups you want it to cover.
- Watch the first cycle run, with Slack, Teams, or Google Chat notifications on every start, stop, and failure, then layer in idle cleanup and guided rightsizing.

Production stays excluded by default throughout, and because discovery and recommendations are read-only, you can prove the value before you enable a single action.

## Frequently asked questions

### What if I need to cancel the event?

Cancel is retry-safe. The executor sweeps every zopnight-event-* scheduled action for the target so no orphans leak on partial failures. ECS errors are joined via errors.Join so partial-failure messages name every action that failed to delete.

### Will Event Readiness modify my database?

No. Databases are monitor-only. ZopNight returns sizing recommendations (connection-pool math, headroom, suggested tier) but DB tier changes and replica scaling stay with your DBA team.