Have you seen the 22nd film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Endgame? Were you able to get the first-day first show ticket? If Yes, then you must have been one of the luckiest people on that day.
Considering the massive fan-base of the MCU, ticketing tech was under duress in many parts of the world. In the US, the largest theatre chain, AMC Entertainment’s website even crashed temporarily. In India, too, Twitter was filled with complaints of server breakdowns, website and app glitches.
The movie broke all records of both Hollywood and Bollywood releases in India. And BookMyShow contributed to nearly half of its more than ₹300 crore box office collections in India, the company claims. But ever thought how it was possible?
Here are the ways BookMyShow used to gear up themselves to cope with the madness of Avengers:
1. High Demand Prior To The Release:
Considering the million big fan-following for Avengers, the influx of traffic for the film was already expected prior to the release. Optimization of the infrastructure to combat the massive incoming traffic was ensured. There was thrice the number of people who reached out to BookMyShow to book tickets for Endgame, as compared to any other film during that period.
2. Preparation
They ensured that their applications were built for scale and a combination of technologies like MongoDB, Aerospike, Galera and few others was used to store data reliably at scale. The traffic was so big that they sold 76 tickets in one second at peak.
3. Time & Dedication
Avengers: Endgame was the most awaited film for the millennials; the traffic was expected to multiply significantly. They constantly kept scaling their systems. However, they spent about two weeks for final touch-ups before the launch of Avengers: Endgame.
4. Resources, Funds, Staffs
Several teams spent the fortnight before the ticket sales went live to ensure a smooth process of ticket selling. BookMyShow employees across engineering, DevOps (technology development operations), tech support, marketing, and cinema operations were dedicated to making Avengers: Endgame a success on the platform.
5. Challenges
The craze for the film was terrific, sometimes resulting in users not getting their preferred seats. As soon as the tickets went live, an influx of almost 500% across data centres and 650,000 requests per minute on certain micro-services were observed. This enabled them to sell more than a million tickets in just over a day. Despite the high traffic, these auto-scaling technologies helped handle the heavy load to ensure that the systems ran as smoothly as possible, not breaking even once.
Truly, without BookMyShow, Avengers: Endgame wouldn’t have reached this height in the film industry.
