Housekeeping dispatcher
A small system that turns a list of rooms into a sensible order of work for each person, respects do-not-disturb absolutely, keeps the walking down, shares the hard rooms out, and leaves the decision that a room is ready with the person who looked at it. Seven posts on the same system, one diagram at a time, with a cost breakdown and an engineering reference at the end.
- 01
A housekeeping dispatcher on AWS for a few dollars a month
The whole system on one page — priority, route, fairness — and the three constraints that pull against each other.
- 02
How rooms get prioritised
What actually makes a room urgent, how arrival times drive the order, why stayovers are different work, and how do-not-disturb is handled without an override.
- 03
Why the route matters as much as the order
How much walking a priority-ordered list costs, why contiguous blocks work, how much priority is worth trading, and the trolley constraint nobody models.
- 04
How the work gets shared out fairly
Why room count is the wrong unit, how difficulty is measured, why fairness is a weekly rather than daily property, and how the rotation is made visible.
- 05
What ready actually means, and who says it
Why cleaned and inspected are separate states, who sets each, how maintenance issues are captured, and what happens when reception needs a room that is not ready.
- 06
What the housekeeping dispatcher costs
About $10 a month. One Bedrock read per room-day is the only line that grows; the queue, the table, the mail and the storage are rounding errors. Plus the three ways the bill could surprise you.
- 07
Engineering reference: the housekeeping dispatcher architecture
Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, region, Lambda inventory, IAM scopes, the schemas and the exact model id.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a housekeeping dispatcher?
- A small serverless system that assigns rooms to housekeepers in an order that reflects arrival times, walking distance, do-not-disturb status and a fair share of the difficult rooms.
- Why does the route matter?
- Because walking between floors is unpaid, unproductive time, and a strictly priority-ordered list can send somebody up and down four times in a morning.
- What happens to a do-not-disturb room?
- Nothing. It is deferred and re-offered later, and there is no override in the system. The escalation is a person knocking at a stated hour, not a dispatch.
- Does the system mark rooms ready?
- No. A person says a room is ready, and inspection is a separate state from cleaned. The post on this explains why conflating them is a problem.
- What does it cost to run?
- A couple of dollars a month. See part six.