Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Being good neighbors: Rate limiting in a modern application world (BOA311)

Summary

The session focused on building modern applications that scale and process large amounts of data without negatively impacting legacy systems or partner systems.
The speakers discussed the evolution of modern applications, emphasizing the challenges of scale, global reach, response time, and data handling.
They highlighted the importance of setting limits to prevent modern systems from overwhelming other parts of the system or causing DDoS-like issues.
The session included a live demo where the audience participated in a load test on a serverless application, demonstrating the need for and implementation of rate limiting.
Techniques for setting limits included Lambda function concurrency, event filtering, and using buffers or proxies like Amazon RDS Proxy.
The speakers also discussed API throttling, caching strategies, and the importance of asynchronous workloads to reduce the load on systems.
Liel from DoControl shared insights on how they use AWS services like RDS Proxy and Step Functions to manage connections and handle errors in their SaaS security platform.

Modern applications must be designed with consideration for the limitations of other systems they interact with, including legacy and third-party systems.
Rate limiting and proper error handling are crucial for maintaining system stability and avoiding overloading other services.
AWS provides various services and techniques to help manage the load on systems, such as Lambda concurrency limits, event filtering, SQS buffers, RDS Proxy, API Gateway throttling, and caching with ElastiCache.
Asynchronous processing and state management using AWS Step Functions can significantly improve the resilience and scalability of applications.
Managed services like EventBridge API destinations can offload complexity from application code and provide built-in mechanisms for handling errors and respecting rate limits.
Implementing these strategies not only improves the performance and reliability of modern applications but also ensures they are "good neighbors" within the broader system ecosystem.