Thoughts On The AWS Virtual Waiting Room Solution

4 minute read | Last updated 2-Aug-2022 | An icon depicting a retail tag with a heart for 'favourite' AWS Cloud

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 .

Tweet 1/10 Next tweet

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

Tweet 2/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 3/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 4/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 5/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 6/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 7/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 8/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 9/10 Next tweet Start

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

Tweet 10/10 Next tweet Start

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

Start