Three zones. One goes dark.
Can your service keep up within the worker budget?
Northline Dispatch
Authored exercise inputs. No provider price or performance benchmark.
- Peak notifications
- 12,000 jobs/second
- Transactional / optional digest
- 9,600 / 2,400 jobs/second
- One worker
- 2,000 attempts/second
- One-zone impairment
- 120 seconds
- Worker cost / total worker budget
- $60 per month / $750 per month
What the model assumes
Equal worker counts across three independent zones. Constant arrivals and attempt capacity. An empty queue at the start of the impairment. No emergency worker launch. The same demand continues after full recovery.
Retries use the stated additional attempt budget. Optional digest deferral needs business approval and a separate catch-up plan. Queue durability, failover delay, shared dependencies, latency percentiles and operating costs are outside this model.
How the envelope works
Admitted jobs/second × attempts/job gives attempt demand. Workers × attempts/second/worker gives capacity. Remove a zone before comparing them. A positive shortfall × 120 seconds gives the queued attempts in this model.
After full recovery, backlog ÷ positive spare attempts/second gives drain seconds. With no spare capacity, the backlog cannot drain while demand continues. Deferred digest work is excluded and must be planned separately.
Amazon / AWS: surviving capacity and safe retries