I worked alongside a small team to update the Apple Music Festival (formerly iTunes Festival) ticketing website for their 10th year. The existing website managed the ticket allocation and this project extended it to also handle entry. Apple sent out notifications to all Apple Music users in the UK on the morning the entry opened, as such we needed to ensure the application was ready to handle this.

The entry form was integrated into the Apple Music application in an iframe and due to the nature of the release we expected a burst of traffic for ticket entry. Later there would be the allocation of tickets and ticket validation on the day but the main challenge was to make sure that we could handle the spike in traffic after notifying users that ticket entry was available.

Apple provided us some numbers that we used to calculate our expected throughput and the application was carefully load tested to make sure that there would be no surprises on the day. Although the throughput numbers were not crazy big they were big enough that we had a few issues to overcome and with the necessary optimisations made things went off without a hitch.