Ticketmaster believes the successful deployment of open-source platform Kubernetes can help it stay one step ahead of its rivals.
The company began a strategy of “self-disruption” in 2013 as it concluded that a continuous process of revolution within its technological infrastructure would help it to remain at the top of the tickets sector.
With 21 different ticketing systems and more than 250 unique products, Ticketmaster also has 65 cross-functional software product teams. It has shifted from a private cloud implementation, with over 22,000 virtual machines across seven global data centres, to the public cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Speaking at the 2016 CloudNativeCon tech conference in Seattle, two of Ticketmaster’s senior executives explained that the company has elected to use Kubernetes, the open-source platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, to allow the development teams to focus on creating new products.
The Kubernetes project, which was started by Google in 2014, builds upon the tech giant’s experience of running production workloads at scale, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Kraig Amador, Ticketmaster’s senior director of core platform, is leading the effort to fully implement Kubernetes at the company. According to the Linux.com website, he said their work is far from over, but early returns have been very promising, with the DevOps team having built tools to gauge the health of each piece of code and help make sure all products are running smoothly and independently.
He said: “By putting in the Kubernetes and leveraging the pod health checks, Kubernetes can catch that for us and bring it back up for us. We don't have to go in there and manually manage it anymore, it just kind of does its own thing.”
Justin Dean, Ticketmaster’s senior vice-president of platform and technical operations, said the company was very deliberate in its decision to move to public cloud. He believes they are building an infrastructure that allows it to turn over $25bn each year while also having room to grow seamlessly.
“We have to ensure we have the right strategies,” Dean said, according to Linux.com. “One of those is really ensuring that we are betting big in the right communities. We definitely feel that the Kubernetes community is the community that we want to be a part of. And we want to encourage others to join us along the journey and add more anchors of big companies into the community so that it can continue to thrive, grow so that some of these problems get solved and we divide and conquer.”
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