FAQ Series: What is an overlord-minion architecture?

What do you do when even batch processing can’t save you? Yaron suggests giving the overlord-minion pattern a try.

The first step to speed is usually batch processing. All that’s needed there is a server + queue. When the server is ready to work, it grabs a batch of requests from the queue. This works well for most cases! But, what if the queue grows very large?

Adding an overlord means you can easily distribute the work. The overlord monitors the number of requests in the queue. When the overlord sees a large amount of requests, it’ll create minions to do the work.

More minions, more speed, more happy developers.