Bongo’s Bingo improves the performance and scaling of its ticketing sales platform during ticket releases

Overview

Bongo’s Bingo, facing ticketing platform issues during peak sales, partnered with Lambert Labs to implement an automated scaling solution. Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Auto Scaling, they achieved 100% uptime, reduced costs, and improved DevOps, ensuring seamless ticket purchases for their high-demand events.

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

Bongo’s Bingo, a popular entertainment company known for its unique blend of bingo, music, and rave, faced a critical challenge in ensuring a smooth and reliable online ticketing experience for its customers. The company’s website experienced significant strain during high-demand ticket releases, often leading to server errors, slowdowns, and failed purchases. These issues resulted in frustrated customers, lost revenue, and potential damage to the company’s reputation.    

The existing infrastructure, while hosted on AWS, relied heavily on manual scaling and vertical scaling methods. This approach proved to be inefficient and time-consuming, requiring significant effort from the technical team to anticipate and respond to traffic spikes. Moreover, the manual nature of the scaling process increased the risk of errors and delays, further impacting the customer experience. Bongo’s Bingo needed a solution that could automatically scale its infrastructure to handle unpredictable traffic surges, ensuring a seamless and reliable ticketing experience for its customers, while also reducing the operational burden on its technical team.

Solution

To address Bongo’s Bingo’s scaling and performance challenges, we implemented a comprehensive solution leveraging Elastic Beanstalk and other AWS services. We containerized their Django application using Docker, ensuring consistency across environments and streamlining deployment within Elastic Beanstalk.

Previously, Bongo’s Bingo employed a manual scaling approach, adding and removing Amazon EC2 instances to a target group based on anticipated traffic. This process was time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to errors. To automate this, we replaced their manual scaling approach with a dynamic autoscaling solution using Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) within Elastic Beanstalk. This involved configuring the ASG to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on real-time traffic demands, such as CPU (Central Processing Unit) utilization.

We also enhanced monitoring capabilities by implementing comprehensive Amazon CloudWatch dashboards. These dashboards provided real-time insights into application and database performance, enabling proactive identification and resolution of potential bottlenecks.

Uptime of the site was at 100%, traffic was up due to that and errors experienced by customers had dropped consistently across the board. Our site and development infrastructure worked consistently thanks to Lambert Labs. (Daniel Sailes, Senior Web Developer, Bongo’s Bingo)

Outcome

The implementation of the new AWS infrastructure resulted in significant improvements for Bongo’s Bingo. Most notably, website uptime increased to 100%, even during peak traffic periods for ticket releases. This improvement was a direct result of the dynamic autoscaling solution, which ensured that the infrastructure could adapt to sudden increases in demand.

The shift to automated scaling also led to a substantial reduction in AWS costs. By eliminating the need for manual over-provisioning, Bongo’s Bingo was able to optimize its resource utilization and avoid unnecessary expenses.

Furthermore, the containerization of the application and the implementation of Elastic Beanstalk facilitated a broader improvement in Bongo’s Bingo’s DevOps practices. This included the implementation of a robust CI/CD pipeline, which streamlined the deployment process and enhanced the overall efficiency of their development operations.

Not every website needs auto scaling, but here it was essential in order to handle the traffic peaks associated with Bongo’s Bingo’s ticket launches. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Bongo’s Bingo

Bongo’s Bingo is a unique entertainment experience that combines traditional bingo with music, rave intervals, and audience participation. Founded in Liverpool in 2015, Bongo’s Bingo has gained immense popularity, hosting events across the UK and internationally. These events offer an immersive and inclusive atmosphere where attendees can enjoy a mix of bingo, dance-offs, and the chance to win iconic prizes.