AWS Architecture for a High-Traffic Laravel/Node.js Application

Here is a production-grade reference architecture for web applications that must handle heavy, unpredictable traffic spikes.

Architecture Breakdown

1. Edge Layer

• Route 53: DNS management with health checks and latency routing.
• CloudFront: Global CDN for static asset caching and dynamic origin acceleration.
• AWS WAF: Protects against SQLi, XSS, rate limits, and bot traffic.

2. Application Layer

• Application Load Balancer (ALB): Spans multiple Availability Zones with SSL termination.
• App Servers: Auto Scaling Group on EC2 or ECS/Fargate in private subnets.
• Auto Scaling Policies: Scale based on request count, CPU utilization, or target tracking.

3. Data & Caching Layer

• Amazon Aurora / RDS: Multi-AZ deployment with Read Replicas for heavy read operations.
• ElastiCache (Redis): Session store, application cache, and job queue backend.
• Amazon S3: Direct client uploads and static asset storage.

4. Asynchronous Processing Layer

• Amazon SQS / Redis Queues: Dedicated queue workers running in background auto-scaling groups for processing emails, reports, and media.

Framework-Specific Gotchas

Laravel: Never use local disk for sessions or file uploads. Run the queue worker and scheduled cron (`schedule:run`) on dedicated nodes. Cache route and configuration files during build time.

Node.js: Keep the application stateless. Use multi-process cluster mode or multiple container replicas. Handle `SIGTERM` signals for connection draining, and carefully size database connection pools.

What would you change in this setup?