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Thoughts On The AWS Virtual Waiting Room Solution

Building a ticketing or registration system? AWS just released a solution to help queue demand.

Thoughts On The AWS Virtual Waiting Room Solution

If you’re building a ticketing or registration system, you’ll probably want to queue users in order to make sure that you’re processing them in an orderly manner. This pattern can also come into play for retail systems when there’s a big sale or event.

As much as we’d all like to avoid implementing this pattern, a queue or virtual waiting room is way better than users getting errors as your system tries to process all of the transactions.

This pattern is also useful when you have a specific date and time you’re launching something. You know that users are going to show up early. Instead of refreshing, this pattern helps them queue.

AWS has wrapped up a nice solution for this pattern in their “AWS Virtual Waiting Room Solution.” My thoughts and more details in this Twitter thread 👇.

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over on the @awscloud Compute Blog, there's a new post highlight a virtual watiing room solution the full post is at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-virtual-waiting-room/ some thoughts 👇 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud 1] the waiting room or queue pattern is needed in a lot of different scenarios. one of the most common used to be tickets to events. but really anytime you expect a major spike in demand with limited and unique supply, this pattern is useful 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud rage-y sidenote: I hit this one 2x per year with my city's recreation registration. they don't use this pattern and it means that users end up in a "refresh, fail, refresh" angry loop 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud 2] this is the solution design 👇. it's robust, but another project that gives me pause I ❤️ that @awscloud is providing more concrete examples of what you can build ...but, the number of services & complexity of these solutions is only increasing 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud ...while it's easy to view the solution in this nice architecture diagram 👆, it doesn't show up in the console like this you need to ensure that everythign is tagger properly (not too hard) & then view the components service by service 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud sidenote: @awscloud already has a good idea of what we consider a workload. some native service that provides a dashboard for the health and operations of specific CloudFormation templates would be amazing 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud 3] back to the solution, the team has done a good job of building out a simple control panel (that you could easily customize) to monitor the state of the queue that's critical for this pattern 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud 4] this solutoin is robust. that's part of the reason for the large number of services involved (14!). this pattern needs to be extrememly resilient becuase it's protecting another solution & users are going to be using it in a time of stress/high anxiety 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud 5] I would like to @awscloud add ballpark costs for these solutions. of course cost is going to vary but. a rough idea of "this price ideal, $ for X users in queue for an hour, etc." would help people get an idea of what they're deploying 🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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@awscloud bottom line on the AWS Virtual Waiting Room is that if you need this pattern, you're probably going to end up building something like this anyway a pre-built & well testing solution from @awscloud can help jump start your efforts here /🧵 #cloud #devops

@marknca tweeted at 15-Feb-2022, 14:11

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