title: Scheduled items update in a distributed system
body: <p>I have a MongoDB with documents with updatedAt: Date field, every 30 seconds I have to update each item, so when an item is expired for more than 30 seconds(updatedAt &lt; now) I update it. An update is expensive, involving GPU, CPU intensive tasks, so I have multiple worker nodes. To distribute work among the nodes I use AWS SQS. Each minute by cron a lambda function reads all the expired items from a DB and pushes messages to a queue, first with a delay of 0, second with a delay of 30 seconds, because cron is with minute precision in AWS.</p>
  <p>Are there any alternative architecture decisions, without SQS? in the future I want to update items every 5 seconds, SQS will be an expensive solution here, or even without cron</p>