AWS Tackles Complex Email Campaigns with EventBridge Scheduler

Managing large-scale email campaigns can be complex, especially when it comes to sending emails at the optimal time for each recipient. To tackle this challenge, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed a solution using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler.

AWS explains that traditional approaches such as batch cron jobs and delay queues can become bottlenecked and inefficient at scale. Instead, EventBridge Scheduler treats each email send as a discrete scheduled action, holding the intent with zero compute cost until the moment arrives to trigger the scheduled action.

The solution involves creating one schedule per recipient for each campaign step through an AWS Step Functions state machine using Distributed Map to accelerate schedule creation. This allows for parallel processing of large datasets and efficient handling of billions of individual schedules.

At the scheduled time, Amazon EventBridge Scheduler invokes Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) directly, passing template variables and personalization data. This enables complex personalization logic and routing through AWS Lambda functions before SES if needed.