Editors Note: This blog was originally published in 2015 and was re-published in November 2017. It has been updated and refreshed to reflect new trends and improve accuracy.
With the holiday season quickly approaching and events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday on the horizon, the increase in gift shopping promises to cause surges in traffic for ecommerce sites, which creates headaches for companies and consumers alike. However, despite the annual timeliness of this problem, many companies don’t have a solid solution or plan in place. Yet these shopping trends only grow, leaving everyone to wonder, what’s the best way to prepare for this unprecedented traffic.
Star Wars Launches Traffic Surge
To get a good glimpse of the implications of what happens when a traffic surge strikes, we only need to look at what happened when Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released in 2015. When pre-sale tickets went live in October, records were set and websites around the world crashed under the weight of the unprecedented demand. This was two months before the movie was even released, which was scheduled for December.
MovieTickets.com offers pre-sale tickets for more than 200 movie chains around the world, and is one of the largest movie ticket sales companies on the planet. Determined to to satisfy customer demand, the company made a bold decision after the presale challenge to move its entire infrastructure to AWS in just a few weeks to be ready for the movie’s opening weekend. The existing on-premise infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to scale with such extreme surges in traffic.
Preparing for Traffic Spike with AWS
Knowing their infrastructure was a hinderance, MovieTickets.com turned to AWS Premier Consulting Partner Onica to make the transition. Onica worked with the MovieTickets Information Systems team to design and construct an AWS environment that could handle variable and large-scale load increases, while remaining PCI compliant.
The goal was to be able to accommodate 1 million requests per minute without impairing system performance. They tested the system’s durability repeatedly, running drills for web server failures, database failures, and more to ensure zero downtime while maintaining the target number of requests per minute.
When tickets went on sale November 29th for the opening weekend for The Force Awakens, the MovieTickets.com e-commerce site performed flawlessly, handling all requests and performing 33 percent faster than its previous infrastructure. Other online movie ticket vendors could not compare with their customers experiencing long waits in an online queue before receiving a time-out message.
“Thanks to the extraordinary effort and skill of both Onica and the MovieTickets.com IT and DB teams, we were able to migrate 15 years of infrastructure in 3 weeks,” said Craig Leftkowitz, director of information systems for MovieTickets.com, of the experience.
Uptime = Customer Satisfaction
Crashes and long wait times can kill customer satisfaction and can be a major reason shoppers abandon carts and even abandon brands. While you may think you’re prepared for Black Friday, not all demand surges can be predicted, and even those that can be predicted don’t always have the best result. Tax day is an annual certainty, and yet this year the website crashed as millions of people attempted to file their taxes, forcing the IRS to offer an extension.
AWS offers the most scalable network infrastructure available with the ability to add capacity on-demand, best-in-class load balancing and dozens of Availability Zones around the world. Onica is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that has helped companies like MovieTickets.com migrate infrastructures and improve network performance for high-traffic events.
Is your e-commerce site ready for Black Friday? Request a free consultation today!
