Space-Based Architecture

Consider a concert ticketing site on the morning a major tour goes on sale.

Traffic does not ramp gradually. It goes from a few hundred users to several hundred thousand in under a minute, all of them trying to update the same few inventory records.

The team has done everything the standard playbook says: stateless application servers behind a load balancer, auto-scaling groups, a cache in front of the database, read replicas.

The application tier scales well. Then the database runs out of connections and write capacity, and requests start to time out.