During large mail-in form seasons, OCR processing demand spikes independently of steady citizen web traffic. How should the architecture scale?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
When the mail trucks dump forms, grow OCR—not the whole website. Keep the tiers elastic on their own dials.
Full Explanation
OCR demand during large mail-in form seasons often spikes independently of steady citizen web traffic, so tiers should scale independently. Scaling the OCR tier with its own Auto Scaling (or equivalent) prevents seasonal OCR load from forcing web overprovisioning. Scaling web and OCR as one combined ASG so every web instance also runs OCR couples unrelated load shapes. Scaling only the web tier while leaving OCR on a fixed box makes OCR the bottleneck. Turning off elasticity and buying one max-sized host for both tiers year-round wastes money off-season. Exam caveat: independent scaling needs separate queues or service boundaries so OCR backlogs do not block web threads. Operational check: load-test OCR submissions separately from web browsing, confirm OCR ASG scale-out without growing web capacity unnecessarily, and watch DLQ/queue depth during the spike. In municipal cloud governance, record the owners, success metrics, and rollback or restore contacts beside this technical choice so the next incident, budget review, or audit does not rediscover the decision from scratch under time pressure. In municipal cloud governance, record the owners, success metrics, and rollback or restore contacts beside this technical choice so the next incident, budget review, or audit does not rediscover the decision from scratch under time pressure.