If you’ve attempted to build a dashboard, then you’re familiar with the hassle of polling. You hit your API every couple of seconds, grab updates, and pray your data doesn’t feel stale. However, if we’re being honest, polling is inefficient, wasteful, and antiquated. In the modern era, users expect supplies to be dynamic and flowing. We, as developers, should meet that expectation without melting our servers.

In this post, I will walk you through a serverless, event-driven architecture that I’ve leveraged to build real-time dashboards using AWS. This architecture will tie together EventBridge, OpenSearch, and API Gateway WebSockets with a hint of Lambda and DynamoDB. By the end, you’ll have some understanding of how all the pieces are tied together to create a live dashboard data pipeline that can scale, can be cost-friendly, and actually feels fast for the end-user.