Justin Bieber tickets sales campaign with AWS cloud

AWS cloud once again proved to be the best solution for Prestige MJM agency, which had planned a great tickets sales campaign for Justin Bieber concert. Efficient and scalable solution based on Amazon Web Services allowed to handle massive user traffic and flawless ticket sales.
 
 

AWS cloud – project description

Prestige MJM agency organise concerts of world’s biggest music stars (Jose Carreras, Rod Stewart, Lionel Richie, Bryan Adams, Justin Timberlake, etc.). In December 2015 the company has planned Justin Bieber tickets sales campaign. This Canadian pop star has millions of fans around the world. Concert in Krakow Tauron Arena from the beggining has fired the imagination of Bieber’s fans. Considering the extraordinary popularity of Justin Bieber and the importance of the event, Prestige MJM asked Hostersi about taking care of the stability and performance of sales platform bilety.imprezyprestige.com. Interest in the concert of Justin Bieber was huge, so we had to prepare infrastructure of sales platform for high-traffic.

 
Challenge

Considering the extraordinary popularity of Justin Bieber, the real challenge was to prepare an efficient and scalable solution that could handle the huge traffic of Internet users, especially in the first hour of sales campaign. The traffic, which is then generated is a few thousand times greater than the traffic during normal service work. Amazon Web Services was the solution.

In this kind of sales campaign, it is extremely difficult to design an efficient solution that can handle a sudden traffic peak. Therefore, cloud computing and its scalability perfectly suited to the task.

Implementation

The scope of our work included the design and implementation of highly scalable HA infrastructure, based on Amazon Web Services, deployment services, transfer savings, DDoS protection, (CloudFlare) and management of the AWS cloud, ensuring stable operation and ongoing monitoring applications. The main objective of the project was to adapt the application infrastructure to the huge load generated by the fans of Justin Bieber, who want to buy tickets.
The implementation process we divided into several basic stages:

Stage 1 – AWS cloud – preparation and implementation of the infrastructure

We launched c3.xlarge instances for the web and c3.4xlarge instances for the database. We also configured the Elastic Load Balancer, whose task was spreading the traffic between AWS instances to achieve better application performance. Scaling was made possible by the fact that iKSORIS, ticketing system, which is used by Prestige MJM, was able to work in the cloud environment and use the cloud in the most optimal way. What’s more, the software itself has an internal system that directs users to purchase a queuing system. Effect? The solution has avoided overloading and maintained high performance of the application.

Step 2 – Implementation of CloudFlare

To reduce transfer costs and prevent DDoS attack, we configured and implemented the service of our official partner, CloudFlare. As a result, they managed to save nearly 90% of the transfer, which is a great result!

Step 3 – Cloud management

Taking care of a stable and efficient operation of the application, adding instances and consulting issues of performance and optimization with the external developer team were our next tasks.

Business benefits

The use of the AWS cloud allowed to handle massive user traffic and eliminating problems with the availability of resources. That means one thing: more tickets sold and greater business efficiency.
In the peak, the application served up to 13 000 users per minute and maintained its original performance.

Amazon Web Services allowed to the flexibility and cost reduction, which would not be possible with traditional physical infrastructure. AWS infrastructure you can buy even for a few days and raise its resources for just a few hours, which in the case of such a campaign like this, it is extremely convenient and allows for maximum economic efficiency.

Testimonial

Thanks to the support of Hostersi team and close collaboration with our developers, Justin Bieber tickets sales campaign was 100% success. Amazon Web Services has passed the exam once again.

Norbert Grell, Prestige MJM

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