Concert.ua handles 1000% traffic spikes with AWS Serverless

Ukraine’s largest event ticketing company, Concert.ua, handles almost half of the country’s online ticket sales. The company found that its website was being overwhelmed with traffic following concert announcements, or even just a mention of a popular event on social media. The site experienced traffic increases of anywhere between 400 and 1,000 per cent within minutes.

In order to handle this influx in traffic and to provide its customers with a smooth and reliable experience, Concert.ua turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Yevgen Lysenko, Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Concert.ua said: “We were looking for a magic button that we could press to make our transaction processing run faster. Instead, we found AWS Fargate.”

Using fully automated scaling and a serverless architecture built on AWS, Concert.ua has increased the availability of its systems and also reduced infrastructure costs. Its customers are able to reliably purchase tickets for popular events, even when traffic is high.

Concert.ua now uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that allows code to be run for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers, and Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud.

AWS Lambda processes multiple transactions at once, so customers now don't have to wait. As soon as they complete their transaction, Concert.ua generates and dispatches the ticket. “Using AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, we can have simultaneous transactions running in real-time,” says Lysenko. “Everything just works and it’s all automated, which is fantastic.”

Concert.ua developers have also reduced the time it takes to implement APIs using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. Instead of spending time coding, the developers send high-level instructions to AWS Lambda and can manipulate backend services to access data, business logic, and application functionality.

“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 per cent faster. Using AWS, our software development cycle takes less time and effort, by fewer people. And it costs less than our previous setup.”