About Virtual Waiting Room (Beta)

Virtual Waiting Room helps maintain business continuity for your dynamic applications in high-demand situations by placing visitors in a virtual waiting room when your origin reaches its configured capacity limit. It acts as a front-end “shock absorber” when peak traffic volumes require the origin for transaction processing, such as; shopping cart check-outs, donation pages, service/application subscriptions, and form registrations.

Virtual Waiting Room uses First In First Out (FIFO). FIFO is a fair request processing mechanism. Visitors who enter your waiting room first, are the first to leave the waiting room to enter the origin. While in the FIFO waiting room, visitors see their estimated arrival time to enter the origin. When visitors are in the waiting room, updates to the time remaining, and retries to the origin are all automatic. If the session is closed while in the waiting room, the visitor loses their position in the line.

Workflow

The following diagram shows how Virtual Waiting Room works when the number of visitors trying to enter the origin exceeds a set capacity limit. In this example, 100 visitors/second is set as the limit. Visitor1 to Visitor100 enter the origin and Visitor101 and Visitor102 are sent to the virtual waiting room and then to the origin. You can set up to 10,000,000 visitors/second to enter your origin.

Configuring Virtual Waiting Room

To set-up Virtual Waiting Room, you can use the classic cloudlets method with a policy or the standalone method.

• Classic method. Create a Visitor Prioritization FIFO policy in Edge logic Cloudlets Policy Manager and then add the Waiting Room with FIFO behaviors to a property.
• Standalone method with EdgeWorkers. Create user-defined variables (using the Virtual Waiting Room with EdgeWorkers behavior) in Property Manager and apply these variables to the property using EdgeWorkers JavaScripts. An Edge logic Cloudlets policy is not required for this set-up.

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EdgeWorkers enables Virtual Waiting Room logic on the Edge for better scalability when creating and managing a large number of waiting rooms with ease of configuration and management.

Security consideration

Virtual Waiting Room does not distinguish real traffic from malicious traffic or prevent other attacks. Contact your sales representative for information on products that can be used to help avoid undesirable impacts from attackers.

Virtual Waiting Room and Visitor Prioritization cloudlets

Virtual Waiting Room uses FIFO, and there is also a Visitor Prioritization cloudlet that uses probability and percentage based prioritization for entry into the waiting room and origin. Virtual Waiting Room and Visitor Prioritization Comparison provides the differences between these two cloudlets so that you can select the waiting room cloudlet that best meets your business requirements.

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The Virtual Waiting Room behavior in Property Manager requires a Virtual Waiting Room policy. You can not use a Visitor Prioritization policy with the Virtual Waiting Room behavior. The Virtual Waiting Room and Visitor Prioritization Cloudlet behaviors can’t be used together on the same property version.