X-Factor Voting Platform Under the Hood
summary
A serverless-first voting platform on AWS that handled peaks of ~7,500 req/s and ~18M votes while meeting p95 <200 ms and 99.94% availability and cutting infra costs ~55%. It uses CloudFront and Cognito for auth, ElastiCache (Redis) plus DynamoDB for counters, Kinesis streams to S3 (WORM) for audit, OpenSearch for ranking, SNS+SQS and Step Functions for poll lifecycle, and AppSync for clients; a key change replaced Kinesis Firehose with a small Lambda to reduce finalization latency from ~60s to ~8s.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00X-Factor platform intro
- 3:15Live voting system
- 6:47Traffic load patterns
- 10:54Functional vs non-functional reqs
- 13:19New voting platform architecture
- 16:27Real-time notifications
- 20:39Fan-out pattern details
- 23:51First live episode lessons
- 27:03Server refactoring technique
- 29:13Platform performance
- 31:22Serverless costs lessons
- 33:28Technical docs and decisions
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