Ticketing & Registration
Your Ticketbud
February 19, 2019  •  by Lisa Carson

Ticketbud Migrates to Google Cloud to Help Power Large Events

It’s important for Ticketbud to have scalable infrastructure to cater to large events and peak sales times. Hosting our infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ensures this scalability, processing tickets quickly and reliably during peak periods for even the largest of events.

For Ticketbud, migrating over to Google Cloud offers significant benefits for our company and our development team, but ultimately our event organizers and their ticket buyers. Google Cloud provides greater stability, speed and performance. It offers massive scale that’s elastic, so we can use it when we need it. As a ticketing provider, we have to be ready for those big on-sales and peak volume times when thousands of ticket buyers are making purchases at once.

Hosting a Dockerized application on Google Cloud gives our platform flexible scale to handle the largest events at any time. Most new SaaS businesses are now building their infrastructure using Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or another cloud hosting provider. This current best practice provides even small companies with incredible scale and reliability, that previously would have been too expensive to maintain.

Companies that have been around before the cloud hosting wars, are now migrating their development and hosting over to one of the big cloud providers. The question then becomes who to choose in today’s cloud wars. Which is the best cloud platform for your business? Who offers the best value and tech? There are hundreds of articles weighing the pros and cons of AWS, GCP and Azure. Picking the right provider comes down the the needs of the individual business, and each will weigh the pros and cons of providers differently.

Ticketbud moved to Google Cloud because it best fit our needs and we preferred its user friendly interface. We wanted a provider that would help us take advantage of the latest best practices and technologies, specifically Docker and Kubernetes. Containerization with Docker allows us to standardize the deployment artifacts across all developer environments, development, staging, and production.

Google is also the creator of the planet-scale container orchestration tool Kubernetes. Kubernetes solves the problem of easily deploying code out in a rapid and consistent manner. It also allows the infrastructure to be elastic, automatically scaling up and down with user demand. It cycles out unhealthy servers and replaces them with healthy ones. Since Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is considered the Gold Standard for Kubernetes, it was ideal to be on both Google Cloud and GKE.

Once we decided on Google Cloud, moving our PostgreSQL instances from manually configured, bespoke servers to a CloudSQL instance was a logical decision. GCP’s CloudSQL offloaded the overhead of operating a highly-available database with features such as multiple availability zone redundancy, automatically scaling disks, and daily worry-free snapshotted backups. Code commits are automatically picked up by the CI/CD system and deployed into Kubernetes.

The infrastructure can now grow with Ticketbud’s needs, letting Google and Kubernetes manage the details. This means that our developers now have more time to focus on creating great new features for our customers.

Special thanks to Victor Trac at CloudKite who led our transition to containerization and Google Cloud. CloudKite is a DevOps as-a-service consultancy based in Austin, TX. They are Google Cloud Certified.