Absorb large bursts of traffic to your website with the Virtual Waiting Room on AWS - Virtual Waiting Room on AWS

Absorb large bursts of traffic to your website with the Virtual Waiting Room on AWS

Publication date: November 2021 (last update: March 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:

  • Start of sale for concert or sporting event tickets

  • Fire sale or other large retail sale, such as Black Friday

  • New product launch with broad marketing announcements

  • Exam access and class attendance for online testing and lessons

  • Release of medical appointment slots

  • 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 (JWT) that allow users to access the website. For example, if you have an event that lasts for two hours and your website can process 50 users per second, but you expect volume of 250 per second, then you can use this solution to regulate the traffic while allowing users to keep their position in the queue.

This solution provides the following key features:

  • Structured queuing of users into your website

  • Scalability to control traffic for very large event sizes

  • JSON web token generation to allow entry to the target site

  • All functionality is controlled through REST APIs

  • Turnkey API Gateway authorizer for client solutions

  • 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 templates that launch and configure the AWS services required to deploy this solution using AWS best practices for security and availability.

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.