Survive the viral launch

expert

Scenario & brief

Launch day: 15,000 rps, and the product cannot go down or crawl — 99.99% availability, p99 ≤ 110 ms, critical durability, under $2,200/mo. You start with only a bare single-AZ fleet and a database.

Build the rest from the palette and tune everything: an autoscaling Graviton origin across three AZs, a CDN for edge load, an ElastiCache tier, and a Multi-AZ database with a read replica so the data tier survives an AZ loss too. Watch the budget — this is the full boss fight.

15,000 rps peakp99 ≤ 110ms99.99% availdurability: criticalbudget $2,200/mo

Add components

Decide what this architecture actually needs — not every option belongs here.

Origin Servers

Compute

Instance class

Scaling

Instances (static)

8instances

Availability Zones

Purchasing

System health

Erupting · SLA breach

/ 100

Score

SLA not met yet

Monthly cost

$4,858

Budget $2,200/mo · $2,658 over

Metrics

Capacity23

Availability30

Durability25

Cost efficiency0

Requirements

Peak capacity — 52000 rps compute · 3400 rps db (need ≥ 15000 rps)
p99 latency — ~134 ms (need ≤ 110 ms)
Availability — 99.00% (need ≥ 99.99%)
Durability — at risk (need redundancy + backups)
Budget — $4858/mo (need ≤ $2200/mo)

Advisor

The database is saturated at peak — add a cache to shed read load, or scale it up.
Compute runs in a single AZ — spread across ≥2 AZs (with ≥2 instances) to meet the availability target.
The database has no Multi-AZ standby or replica — a failure risks data loss. Enable Multi-AZ and backups.

Discussion

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For learning purposes only. Costs and capacities are illustrative, not live AWS prices. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services.