SUS03-BP01 Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs - AWS Well-Architected Framework
Implementation guidanceResources

SUS03-BP01 Optimize software and architecture for asynchronous and scheduled jobs

Use efficient software and architecture patterns such as queue-driven to maintain consistent high utilization of deployed resources.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You overprovision the resources in your cloud workload to meet unforeseen spikes in demand.

  • Your architecture does not decouple senders and receivers of asynchronous messages by a messaging component.

Benefits of establishing this best practice:

  • Efficient software and architecture patterns minimize the unused resources in your workload and improve the overall efficiency.

  • You can scale the processing independently of the receiving of asynchronous messages.

  • Through a messaging component, you have relaxed availability requirements that you can meet with fewer resources.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Use efficient architecture patterns such as event-driven architecture that result in even utilization of components and minimize overprovisioning in your workload. Using efficient architecture patterns minimizes idle resources from lack of use due to changes in demand over time.

Understand the requirements of your workload components and adopt architecture patterns that increase overall utilization of resources. Retire components that are no longer required.

Implementation steps

  • Analyze the demand for your workload to determine how to respond to those.

  • For requests or jobs that don’t require synchronous responses, use queue-driven architectures and auto scaling workers to maximize utilization. Here are some examples of when you might consider queue-driven architecture:

    Queuing mechanism Description

    AWS Batch job queues

    AWS Batch jobs are submitted to a job queue where they reside until they can be scheduled to run in a compute environment.

    Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

    Pairing Amazon SQS and Spot Instances to build fault tolerant and efficient architecture.

  • For requests or jobs that can be processed anytime, use scheduling mechanisms to process jobs in batch for more efficiency. Here are some examples of scheduling mechanisms on AWS:

    Scheduling mechanism Description

    Amazon EventBridge Scheduler

    A capability from Amazon EventBridge that allows you to create, run, and manage scheduled tasks at scale.

    AWS Glue time-based schedule

    Define a time-based schedule for your crawlers and jobs in AWS Glue.

    Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) scheduled tasks

    Amazon ECS supports creating scheduled tasks. Scheduled tasks use Amazon EventBridge rules to run tasks either on a schedule or in a response to an EventBridge event.

    Instance Scheduler

    Configure start and stop schedules for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon Relational Database Service instances.

  • If you use polling and webhooks mechanisms in your architecture, replace those with events. Use event-driven architectures to build highly efficient workloads.

  • Leverage serverless on AWS to eliminate over-provisioned infrastructure.

  • Right size individual components of your architecture to prevent idling resources waiting for input.

Resources

Related documents:

Related videos: