Engineering Resilient Systems on AWS

Chapter 9. Building Reliable News Feed Ingestion and Search APIs

In the early 19th century, Nathan Rothschild, a prominent Rothschild banking family member, demonstrated the power of timely information in financial markets. Legend has it that Rothschild received news of the British victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 before official government channels. He used this knowledge to mislead other traders into panic-selling their British government bonds, secretly buying them up at depressed prices. When the official news of victory reached London, bond prices surged, and Rothschild profited immensely.

The story, while disputed, illustrates how access to exclusive information once gave investors a significant advantage before modern communication technologies. Today, businesses across industries consume real-time information to make decisions and stay competitive. You can build reliable systems to ingest, process, and serve news articles and unstructured data, unlocking the power of timely information retrieval and analysis.

In this chapter, you’ll explore designing and implementing a resilient news feed ingestion and search architecture on AWS. You’ll examine the challenges of fetching articles from unreliable sources and techniques to handle these challenges gracefully. You’ll learn about storing and managing article metadata and content using Amazon MemoryDB for Redis and Amazon S3. You’ll also discover how to ensure data consistency and real-time synchronization between the ...