About TicketBox
TicketBox is an online ticketing platform that helps event organizers in Vietnam and South East Asia to sell tickets, with 3 branches in Vietnam, Thailand, & Singapore.
Since October 2013, Ticketbox has built partnerships with many leading Vietnamese organizers who have had great successes organizing music concerts, K-Pop music events, formal events, etc. In 2015, in collaboration with e-book company Ookbee and its 6 million users, Ticketbox Thailand was founded as a ticketing channel for fans in Thailand to enjoy with convenience and security, and to support organizers with their ticket traffic.
Challenges
When we approached, TicketBox had a decentralized system. There are 3 system running business of Ticketbox – ticketbox.sg, ticketbox.vn and ticketbox.co.th. All hosted on Azure, each server was hosted in a country independently.
Decentralized system is the main reason to limit TicketBox decision on business expansion. The server system was fragile with only a single entry point, unable to scale up when systems must serve too much requests from end-users. This led to the overloading when too many users purchased tickets at a time.
When this happened, data loss was the most common consequences but without backup.
Solutions
We persuaded TicketBox to move from Azure to AWS, designed centralized system architecture, performed migration & deployment, and setup autoscaling system.
The architecture we applied for Ticketbox includes:
- Virtual Private Cloud: to manage Private Network likes traditional VPN
- EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud + RDS multi AZ for SQL Server
- Security Group + Network ACL for Firewall
- Auto Scale: Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) work with AutoScaling Group (ASG), the system can auto scale up/down and all instances in ASG put them under ELB.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): allows storing unlimited files, very high availability and durability
- Elasticache: multi AZ and cluster mode ON for Redis engine
Benefits
Centralized system on cloud is set up security check and data backup system to minimize data loss risk. The system is no longer put on overloading situation during peak seasons.
Infrastructure cost drop to 20% compared to the old one, operations cost is optimize since the system has also been set up Auto Scaling for automatically scaling up on each sessons.
