Ticketmaster turns to the cloud to handle huge spikes in traffic during big event launches

How Ticketmaster handles huge traffic spikes in demand every time tickets for a major gig or show goes on sale.

Ticketmaster experiences the traffic equivalent of a Black Friday from eager fans every time a major gig or show goes on sale, which is why the organisation has executed a steady migration to the cloud.

That's according to Simon Tarry, director of engineering strategy at the firm, speaking to Computing ahead of our sister site V3's Cloud & Infrastructure Live event on 20 and 21 April 2015.

"Ticketmaster's been handling web traffic for almost two decades now, so we've built up our own infrastructure, and part of the problem with that, as a US company, is we've grown through acquisition and bought up a lot of ticketing businesses round the world - as well as all the infrastructure that comes with it," Tarry explained.

With ticketing platforms scaling, and a growing audience increasingly consisting not just of fans "but automated bots as well", Tarry said Ticketmaster's existing infrastructure was reaching critical mass.

As such Ticketmaster currently handles huge amounts of traffic per second at peak times.

"We're faced with Black Friday size traffic during a large on-sale, so we try to separate our human traffic from bot traffic," Tarry told us.

"We're assessing at the moment that kind of journey - how best to take advantage of cloud architecture. So a lot of planning and training is going on right now," Tarry said.

An earlier pilot project involved a cloud migration with an e-commerce stack.

"We tried that first, as a short project, as it was limited in scope to a certain degree," said Tarry.

"But we made a lot of assumptions about the infrastructure that weren't true," he added.

"So we had to challenge a lot of our thinking about the infrastructure and how it would perform. The key criteria for us is to handle a very large on-sale on any platform."

Keeping the lights on and maintaining the ability to cope with a punishing level of traffic was achieved by "strong tooling", said Tarry, including a number of load testing tools. Mechanisms to interrogate the traffic in order to block out traffic Ticketmaster doesn't want also helps in this.

"Part of our DevOps culture is a kind of ‘swat team' who play ‘hunt the bottleneck', spending time diagnosing, testing, and finding the next problem," Tarry said.

"Ultimately, when we're cloud based we want that capacity on-tap - it's not something you can just do," he said. "You need to configure your systems to use that capability."

Join us on 20 April 2015 for the first day or our two-day Cloud & Infrastructure Live 2016 event, and hear more from Ticketmaster's Simon Tarry as he takes part in the panel debate: Deciding when a "cloud first" strategy is right.