During large mail-in form seasons, OCR processing demand spikes ind…

Question

During large mail-in form seasons, OCR processing demand spikes independently of steady citizen web traffic. How should the architecture scale?

Accepted Answer

Scale the OCR tier independently of the web tier using separate Auto Scaling (or equivalent) so seasonal OCR load does not force web overprovisioning — When the mail trucks dump forms, grow OCR—not the whole website. Keep the tiers elastic on their own dials.

Answer

Scale web and OCR as one combined ASG so every web instance also runs OCR batch jobs

Answer

Scale only the web tier and leave OCR on a fixed box that becomes the bottleneck

Answer

Turn off elasticity and buy a single max-sized host for both tiers year-round

During large mail-in form seasons, OCR processing demand spikes independently of steady citizen web traffic. How should the architecture scale?

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