© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Success from failure: creating scalable

ticketing system to fulfill demand peak

Corey Yang, Chief System Architect

2016/05/20

Who we are?

Founded in late 2013, tixCraft.com is the most advanced

cloud-based ticketing system in Taiwan.

- to the FANS

- to the PROMOTERS

- to the VENUES

tixCraft is the latest venture from

ticketing and promotions specialists

who are in the industry more than

a decade.

What have we done?

2008 – IBAF Final Olympic Qualifying Tournament

2009 – NBA Taipei Games, The World Games

2010 – MLB Taiwan Games, Golden Horse Film Festival

2012 – Jacky Cheung 1/2 Century Tour, Girls Generation Tour

2013 – Mayday, Super Junior, G-Dragon, NBA Taipei Games

2014 – YG Family Galaxy Tour, aMEI|AMIT Utopia World Tour

2015 – BigBang World Tour [MADE], ONE OK ROCK “35xxxv”

Asia Tour, WBSC 2015 Premier 12, Golden Horse Film Festival,

Sodagreen Endless Story

2016 – Super Junior “Super Camp”, Namie Amuro “Live Genic”,

Girls Generation “Phantasia”, Love Is King…

What do we want to do?

Situation: we failed every time when selling hot tickets.

Goal: selling tickets smoothly on internet.

Possible solution: large-scale multi-tier system, only

possible by using cloud service

Why AWS?

Evaluation: stability, easy to use, scalability, billing method

Target: ISPs in Taiwan, AWS, and other cloud services

AWS: the most mature, stable, user-friendly and billing by

hour. Almost no differences where we host.

When we started it, we found

Much, much easier and faster for installation new virtual

servers than physical ones.

Much cheaper for building complex structure when using

small instances at the beginning.

Handling services easily like load balancing, moving to

RDS for MySQL, creating Read Replicas.

With good partners like

eCloudvalley we can reduce

exploring/troubleshooting time.

Stress testing and architecture adjustment

Starting with 10,000 t2.micro instances, it costs only

$0.013*10,000=$130 for one hour.

Write simple scripts to simulate users behaviors.

It’s much easier to redesign the whole system when

failed.

Relatively simple to rebuild the new system, and test it all

over again.

Using AWS products/services

High stability, availability, scalability, flexibility

Route 53, CloudFront, S3, ELB, EC2, DynamoDB,

ElastiCache

Amazon EC2Elastic Load

Balancing

Amazon

Route 53

Amazon S3CloudFront DynamoDB ElastiCache

tixCraft’s environment in AWS v1

tixCraft’s environment in AWS v3

tixCraft’s environment in AWS (current)

Benefits with AWS

Lower cost for building larger structure.

Highly scalable, if you build it right.

Agility – you can fail faster, fail cheaper, fail forward

Helping us optimizing and lowering cost. Ex. RDS-

>DynamoDB, EC2->Spot/Block Spot.

1.lower time of deployment: from 1,600 to 20 minutes

2.increase more than 130 times of resources in 30 minutes

3.handle 100,000+ concurrent users purchasing tickets

4.handle 70,000+ ordering requests per minute, max 2,500+ ordering

requests per second

5.have more than 30,000 tickets sold out in 3 minutes

6.pay less than 2 MacBook Pro to accomplish this mission

7.reduce our server cost to 0.26%

8.Accept IOPS from 20 to 135,000 (average number in every minute)

9.by using DynamoDB easily

By moving to AWS, we can

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Corey Yang

Thank You!