Ticketek introduces automation to manage demand for ‘hot shows’

Increasing used of cloud and automation technology by entertainment group TEG has allowed its ticketing arm, Ticketek, to handle the high demand for ‘hot shows’ without crashing.

TEG Enterprise Architect Tane Oakes recently explained to ZDNet how large events push Ticketek’s infrastructure to its limits, advising that traffic goes from “basically zero to 300,000” in under a minute when tickets for in-demand acts and sporting events go on sale.

Oakes explained how TEG went through a process of re-platforming its system to allow for everything to be run with “great parallelism”, commenting “we were running into a data centre and we would have to run our environment as if we were having those hot shows seven days of the week, 24 hours a day – that was costly and doesn’t make sense.”

TEG moved to change how it ran its business internally, deciding to introduce an automated process for scheduling and delivery of its hot shows, something that was previously done manually and often in Excel.

As reported by TheTicketingBusiness, under the new system, users submit a request to schedule a hot show through Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk, which the company already uses.

Oakes added “once it’s been approved, it then hits API Gateway to actually then schedule that hot show into a Dynamo DB database, and then we have Lambda coming and checking using CloudWatch scheduled events to say every minute, ‘Do I have any hot shows that I need to procure’ and then when it finds it, it then hits Service Catalog to actually go and run out the products and spin everything all up.

“When you work between IT and business, one of the things that’s not great is just to keep giving the business different tools, swapping in and out what they’re trying to do, and having five or six different applications to try to do the same things — they use Jira for everything else for the planning and management of the hot show, now we’re just extending that to drive what they’re doing from an IT perspective.”

Oakes said the approval process now sits outside of IT, concluding “what it’s doing is putting a workflow process into driving Service Catalog provisioning of IT services.”