Roboticket and Tenesys Build a Flexible and Scalable Global Ticketing Platform on AWS
Roboticket provides a SaaS ticketing platform for managers at top football clubs in Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The company’s goal is to automate ticketing processes so that club staff can focus on tasks that benefit the fans. The company’s on-premise infrastructure had become a barrier to its growth plans, making it impossible to scale, increase availability, or add new features, all of which were crucial to becoming a market leader.
The Importance of Resilience in the Ticketing Industry
For a ticketing platform like Roboticket, resilience is absolutely critical. Ticket sales for popular sporting events generate extreme but predictable traffic spikes. If the platform fails at this key moment, the company loses not only revenue but also the trust of fans and sports clubs. Platform unavailability during ticket sales for an important match is a public relations and financial disaster. The system must be able to handle tens of thousands of users within minutes.
The Challenge: An On-Premise Infrastructure Holding Back a Global Vision
Roboticket’s ambition to become the leading global ticketing platform was being held back by its physical, on-premise infrastructure. This created critical business problems that threatened the company’s growth.
Lost Sales from Traffic Spikes: The platform couldn’t handle the massive, sudden surges in traffic before major sporting events. As CEO Michał Pyda put it, “Coping with traffic spikes was a challenge before.” This created a high risk of system crashes and lost revenue at the most critical moments.
Barriers to Global Expansion: Entering a new market was a slow and expensive process that required costly and time-consuming installation of on-premise hardware in each country. This made rapid, efficient global growth impossible.
High and Inefficient Costs: The company was burdened by the high costs of maintaining its own hardware and paying for expensive Windows licenses, draining resources that could have been used for innovation.
Compliance and Data Privacy Challenges: Meeting local data privacy regulations (like GDPR) was a major obstacle. “Many of our clients need their data to remain in-country,” said Michał Pyda, Roboticket CEO “which previously would have meant installing on-premise hardware every time we entered a new market.“
The Solution: A Decade-Long Partnership for Cloud Excellence
Roboticket saw AWS as a “pioneer among cloud providers” and needed a partner to help them fully leverage the technology’s potential. The collaboration with Tenesys became fundamental to the company’s growth, evolving over a decade through several key stages:
- Initial “Lift-and-Shift” Migration: Tenesys began by moving the client’s existing infrastructure to the AWS cloud, which immediately provided a more stable foundation
- Continuous Optimization and Cost Reduction: Over the next 10 years, Tenesys continuously refined the cloud setup. This ongoing optimization focused on performance and costs, ultimately leading to a 75% reduction in cloud spending by re-architecting for High Availability and Resilience.
- Implementing True Scalability: To address the critical problem of traffic spikes, Tenesys implemented a modern, containerized architecture using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and other key AWS services.
- To ensure high platform availability: An AMI (Amazon Machine Image) with the IIS/.NET application was used to create an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) distributed across multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ). An Application Load Balancer (ALB) was used to distribute traffic, eliminating single points of failure.
Key resilience indicators were defined as part of the project:
To ensure resilience: The ASG was configured to scale automatically based on the number of requests. The database was migrated to Amazon Aurora for its ability to auto-scale on demand. Data resilience was ensured through automated database snapshots and backups to encrypted Amazon S3 buckets.
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Below 1 minute (near-zero).
- In a ticketing system, the loss of even a single transaction (a sold ticket) is unacceptable. The RPO must be close to zero, which is achieved through synchronous replication in RDS Aurora.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): Below 5 minutes.
- In the event of a failure, the system must return to full functionality within minutes to avoid disrupting the ticket sales process. Automatic failover in a Multi-AZ architecture allows for such a low RTO.
- In the event of a failure, the system must return to full functionality within minutes to avoid disrupting the ticket sales process. Automatic failover in a Multi-AZ architecture allows for such a low RTO.
- Enabling Global Growth and Ensuring Compliance:
- By leveraging AWS Regions and Availability Zones, Roboticket can now launch its services in a new country in just a few hours. This process is supported by Amazon Route 53 for flexible domain management and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring, ensuring that data remains within the region in compliance with local privacy laws.
“We knew Tenesys could get us on the right track with AWS cloud services and help us create a truly responsive ticketing platform,” says Michał Pyda, CEO of Roboticket. “We consider them part of the team and a major contributor to our success.”
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): Below 1 minute (near-zero).
The Results: Explosive Growth, Drastic Cost Reduction, and Global Reach
The transformation to a modern cloud architecture on AWS has delivered transformative results for Roboticket’s business.
Accelerated Growth and Market Expansion: Roboticket increased its client base from 6 to 60 clubs—a tenfold increase. As Michał Pyda notes, “It would have been impossible to grow at the rate we did if we weren’t building on AWS.” The company can now onboard a new client in just 2 weeks and launch its services in a new country in just 2 hours.
Unmatched Scalability and Peace of Mind: Thanks to the newly achieved high availability and resilience, the platform is now capable of handling any demand. “Now, when demand spikes before a big sporting event, we can just add 100 database servers,” Michał Pyda explains. “We don’t have to worry about scaling or maintaining our own hardware. It’s peace of mind for us and our clients.”
Drastic Financial and Operational Efficiency: The partnership resulted in a 75% reduction in cloud costs and lowered the platform’s cost per user by 80%. This financial efficiency is accompanied by operational excellence, as the team is now free from maintaining infrastructure.
Increased Agility and Innovation: Freed from managing hardware, the team can focus on developing new features. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they developed and deployed a new social distancing feature in just one month, demonstrating their newfound agility.
Reduced recovery time to under 5 minutes: Drastically decreased the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) from several hours to just a few minutes and ability to launch services in a new country in just 2 hours.
“Working with Tenesys and AWS has been fundamental to supporting our company’s growth in its cloud journey, as well as for research and development. We consider them part of the team and a huge contributor to our success. By using AWS, we don’t have to worry about whether our cloud configuration is working, and we can focus on making our platform the best it can be.” – Michał Pyda, CEO of Roboticket.