Absorb large bursts of traffic to your website with the Virtual Waiting Room on AWS
Publication date: November 2021 (last update: November 2024)
The Virtual Waiting Room on AWS solution helps control incoming user requests to your website during large bursts of traffic. It creates a cloud infrastructure designed to temporarily offload incoming traffic to your website, and it provides options to customize and integrate a virtual waiting room. This solution can be integrated with either new or existing websites to seamlessly scale to handle sudden surges in traffic.
Examples of large-scale events which could produce a surge in website traffic include:
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Start of sale for concert or sporting event tickets
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Fire sale or other large retail sale, such as Black Friday
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New product launch with broad marketing announcements
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Exam access and class attendance for online testing and lessons
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Release of medical appointment slots
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Launch of a new direct-to-customer service that requires account creation and payments
The solution acts as a holding area for visitors to your website and allows traffic to pass
through when there is enough capacity. The client software used by visitors can be configured to
transparently allow traffic through the waiting room until the website is at maximum capacity;
at which point the waiting room holds back visitors. When your website has capacity for more
traffic, the solution generates JSON Web Tokens
This solution provides the following key features:
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Structured queuing of users into your website
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Scalability to control traffic for very large event sizes
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JSON web token generation to allow entry to the target site
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All functionality is controlled through REST APIs
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Turnkey API Gateway authorizer for client solutions
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Standalone integration or use with OpenID
This implementation guide describes architectural considerations and configuration steps
for deploying Virtual Waiting Room on AWS in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It includes links to
AWS CloudFormation
The guide is intended for IT architects, developers, DevOps staff, data analysts, and marketing technology professionals who have practical experience architecting in the AWS Cloud.