Event-goers enjoy fast and reliable services as SHALB helps the largest ticketing company in Ukraine go serverless.
Concert.ua is one of Ukraine’s leading event ticketing agencies. The company handles almost half of the country’s online ticket sales. For its business to thrive and remain competitive, Concert.ua needs to provide fast and consistent services that will keep its customers happy.
Problem description
Before going serverless with AWS, Concert.ua’s systems were already in the cloud, but they were not optimized for it. It was a legacy infrastructure running on virtual machines that was inefficient and unable to handle sudden traffic spikes.
Announcements of upcoming events attract a huge number of visitors and increase the website’s traffic up to 1,000 percent within minutes. Although Concert.ua’s technical staff planned for such activity spikes in advance, it was hard to estimate the precise number of resources. “Even when a traffic spike was expected, it was always a guess as to how many servers we’d need,” says Yevgen Lysenko, founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Concert.ua. “But there was no other option with the resources and technologies we had at the time.”
With databases flooded with queries and services not responding, customers were faced with delays waiting for their transactions to proceed. Needless to say, this affected the company’s reputation and revenue.
Managing infrastructure was becoming a troublesome and time-consuming task. As a result, Concert.ua was looking for a way to resolve these issues and free up its developers to focus on application enhancement rather than infrastructure troubleshooting.
SHALB, a long-term technical partner of Concert.ua and a certified AWS associate, suggested the company’s transition to AWS out-of-the-box services and offered its help in migration.
Project implementation
SHALB engineers automated the customer’s cloud setup by implementing an Infrastructure as Code approach using Terraform. With infrastructure resources defined in code, the Concert.ua’s systems became easily reproducible, scalable, and manageable from configuration files.
The customer’s applications were containerized and prepared for running serverless on a combined platform. The solution brought together Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), an automated tool for container orchestration, and AWS Fargate, a serverless pay-as-you-go compute engine.
The combination with Fargate made it possible to achieve the fault tolerance of ECS-running applications while also enabling the possibility of their infinite scaling to accommodate sudden traffic spikes.
The customer’s MySQL databases were migrated to Amazon Aurora, a relational database service designed for working in the cloud. The transition to Aurora DB significantly improved the performance of Concert.ua’s databases, making them scalable and capable of efficiently handling customer requests, even when traffic is high.
Employing AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service allows Concert.ua to concurrently process multiple transactions in real time; customers now receive their tickets straight away upon completion of a transaction with no additional waiting time.
Also, using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda dramatically reduced the time it takes for the Concert.ua’s developers to implement APIs. “We couldn’t launch APIs as quickly as we can now,” says Lysenko. “Previously, we had to do a lot of coding but now it’s 300–500 percent faster. Using AWS, our software development cycle takes less time and effort, by fewer people. And it costs less than our previous setup.”
Business results
Since migration to a scalable architecture built on AWS, Concert.ua has increased the reliability and availability of its systems. The company’s website is now secured against sudden traffic spikes and reports 99.9 percent uptime.
Transition to a serverless platform allowed Concert.ua to cut its infrastructure costs and improve customers’ ticket-purchasing experience.
SHALB is proud to be a part of the Concert.ua success story. After all, our teammates are keen event-goers themselves and are the first to appreciate the fast and reliable services of Concert.ua!
SHALB is a certified AWS partner eligible to provide consultancy services and build infrastructures in the Amazon cloud platform. Our expert staff can advise on any kind of cloud-related questions, including migration and optimization of cloud cost and services, to building large scale distributed systems.
