Online ticketing company expands with AWS
Founded in 1998, Madrid-headquartered online ticketing company entradas.com partners with music promoters, theatres and sporting clubs to sell tickets for events. One of Spain’s first e-commerce companies, it was acquired by European ticketing group Eventim in 2014.
In a business that sees huge spikes and leaps in traffic, entradas.com’s existing data center setup, based on physical servers and with staff provisioned to manually compute capacity, was both inefficient and labor-intensive.
As chief technology officer, Marcelo Royán, said: “It was a massive effort to ensure that we could ramp up to meet demand. The infrastructure wasn’t adding value to the business.”
To maximise its website’s functionality and customer experience, the company needed to simplify its application architecture and increase operational efficiency, while also growing beyond the sporting events area of the ticketing market.
With these things in mind, entradas.com began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for development and testing in 2014, after assessing three cloud providers and deciding that AWS stood out both technically and strategically, with a greater range of features.
In 2017, entradas.com was prepared to move entirely to AWS Cloud, with planning for the migration beginning in January with the aim of completion by July, just prior to the start of Spain’s football season. Royán says: “Along with AWS partner Cloudmas, the AWS team supported us during the entire process to ensure a smooth migration in just one day.”
Within a week of migrating, the Spanish and Italian national football teams met in a World Cup qualifier. According to Marcelo Royán: “Arguably, we should have chosen a less-critical event as the first test of our infrastructure on AWS, but it was a complete success. We sold 50,000 tickets in two days [...] and at peak we were selling 500 tickets a minute.”
Since migrating to AWS Cloud, entradas.com has cut its maintenance load 50 per cent, allowing it to spend more time working on improving its platform and adding new features, improving both its competitiveness and customer experience.
