An auction website enables users to bid on collectible items. The auction rules require that each bid is processed only once and in the order it was received. The current implementation is based on a fleet of Amazon EC2 web servers that write bid records into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. A single t2.large instance has a cron job that runs the bid processor, which reads incoming bids from Kinesis Data Streams and processes each bid. The auction site is growing in popularity, but users are complaining that some bids are not registering.
Troubleshooting indicates that the bid processor is too slow during peak demand hours, sometimes crashes while processing, and occasionally loses track of which records is being processed. What changes should make the bid processing more reliable?

Question

An auction website enables users to bid on collectible items. The auction rules require that each bid is processed only once and in the order it was received. The current implementation is based on a fleet of Amazon EC2 web servers that write bid records into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. A single t2.large instance has a cron job that runs the bid processor, which reads incoming bids from Kinesis Data Streams and processes each bid. The auction site is growing in popularity, but users are complaining that some bids are not registering.

Troubleshooting indicates that the bid processor is too slow during peak demand hours, sometimes crashes while processing, and occasionally loses track of which records is being processed. What changes should make the bid processing more reliable?

Amine Alami · Accepted Answer

Switch the EC2 instance type from t2.large to a larger general compute instance type. Put the bid processor EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group that scales out the number of EC2 instances running the bid processor, based on the IncomingRecords metric in Kinesis Data Streams.

Amine Alami · Answer

Refactor the web application to use the Amazon Kinesis Producer Library (KPL) when posting bids to Kinesis Data Streams. Refactor the bid processor to flag each record in Kinesis Data Streams as being unread, processing, and processed. At the start of each bid processing run, scan Kinesis Data Streams for unprocessed records.

Amine Alami · Answer

Refactor the web application to post each incoming bid to an Amazon SNS topic in place of Kinesis Data Streams. Configure the SNS topic to trigger an AWS Lambda function that processes each bid as soon as a user submits it.

Amine Alami · Answer

Refactor the web application to post each incoming bid to an Amazon SQS FIFO queue in place of Kinesis Data Streams. Refactor the bid processor to continuously the SQS queue. Place the bid processing EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and a maximum size of 1.

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