The 5-Second Data Delay That Nearly Broke Us (And How We Fixed It in Milliseconds)

Our financial dashboard suffered from 3-5 second delays, making real-time analytics ineffective. Initial batch-based processing failed, so we switched to DynamoDB Streams + AWS Lambda for instant updates. By optimizing OpenSearch indexing and adding

Less than a month ago, our team came upon a challenge that sounded deceptively simple. The task at hand was to create a dashboard that monitored transactions in real time for a particular financial platform we maintained. In principle, it was straightforward - Event data would be put into DynamoDB, and OpenSearch would be used for real-time analytics.

There was a simple expectation: For every single event that is recorded in DynamoDB, OpenSearch should be ready to analyze it instantly. No delays. No needless waiting.

And this is where we completely miscalculated.

When “Real-Time” Wasn’t Really Real-Time

I remember vividly ...