LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) Francis Arigo, who runs the network team at Ticketmaster and runs its “hybrid cloud,” held a keynote at the Open Networking Summit in Los Angeles March 29.
Arigo, whose official title at TM is Principal Architect, took to song to explain why TM uses a hybrid cloud versus a public cloud to handle the tremendous demands of the ticketing system, which can reach 150 million transactions in minutes after a major artist’s onsale goes live. AXS ticketing, for instance, launched as a cloud-based system and, at the time, TM was known for its buildings filled with servers.
Arigo argued in his “Lessons And Rhythms From The Hybrid Cloud” keynote that the cloud is unreliable, and that ticket buyers actually download their tickets to a mobile wallet and want it available immediately when presenting it at the entrance.
He spent a few minutes correlating the musical timing of whole notes, quarter notes and half-notes to Subnet Masking, following it up with a tune.
Arigo sang a song because “many network programmers are also musicians.” To the tune of Tracey Chapman’s “Fast Car” he sang lyrics like “You’ve got a fast cloud / and I don’t want data centers anywhere” and “I wish we were just coding, CICD pipe deploying so fast I felt I was drunk / the dependencies surround us / we wrap them also docker containers …”
You get the idea.
Using the upcoming Jay-Z / Beyoncé onsale as an example, Arigo noted that a hybrid cloud is necessary because there are huge spikes in demands for tickets from fans and bots for 15 minutes “and then it goes away.”
“Internally, to us, it looks like a DDOS (distributed denial of service),” he said. Because there is a spike of 8 GBps, he said TM created a hybrid, a “self inflicted DDOS” with one of the byproducts TM’s Verified Fan.
Internet reliability is always in flux, Arigo said. You can’t control the hops and it’s not acceptable when tens of thousands of NFL fans are trying to enter the stadium before kickoff when there is a loss of connectivity.
