Reading Cinemas Increases User Experience With An Auto-Scalable Online Ticketing System
Reading Cinemas is a theatre chain with about sixty cinemas across Australia, New Zealand and the United States. They reached out to PolarSeven to modernise their legacy applications and implement auto-scaling for their online ticketing system.
Challenges
The previous system was not scalable and crashed when Reading Cinemas experienced major spikes (1500 users in 5 minutes) in traffic when blockbusters were released
The historic app environment was Amazon EC2- and RDS-based, with additional adjustments on top of that.
They needed an environment with fast auto-scaling to prepare for unexpected future demand.
Moving from an environment that required four to six clicks to make a purchase, and into one that only needs one or two clicks.
Solutions
Application modernisation – PolarSeven rebuilt and rearchitected Reading Cinemas’ legacy apps (PHP, MySQL, RDS, EC2’s)
App development and infrastructure teams united to create a scalable environment, leveraging a combination of AWS Lambda, Node.js and Amazon Aurora.
Benefits
Stability and business availability – the cinema industry is quite competitive, and the ticketing system cannot go down.
They now have scalable online infrastructure that can handle traffic jumping from 20 users to 4,000 users.
Increased user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) – customers can purchase tickets in one to two clicks.
