A ‘Madness’-Ready StubHub: Another Day at the Office

They call it March Madness for a reason — and it’s not just the diehard basketball fans who get to experience it. As you might imagine, at StubHub we experience our own version of Madness. In fact, we’re built for it. And in this era of modernization, we’re thriving on it.

Over the course of this month, 67 college basketball games will be played at venues across the country. That’s 134 rabid college fan bases, their boosters, and thousands of others champing at the bit to witness the best college teams fight the odds and advance to the Final Four. Last year, nearly 700,000 fans attended the NCAA Championship Tournament. This year there will likely be many more.

That’s a lot of people, a lot of tickets, and a whole lot of web and mobile traffic. And once the final buzzer goes off after each game, there is a whole new wave of frantic buying and selling activity on our platforms. Take it from me, this happens multiple times per day across the duration of the tournament.

Modernizing our platform allows us to react faster to the rapidly changing event landscape, whether it’s college basketball or the World Series. In the case of the NCAA Tournament, every win means the next event on our site needs to be updated within minutes. Our teams can now do this faster than ever before.

Fortunately for the 700,000+ fans, handling huge events like March Madness is really all in a day’s work for us.

Little Information, Lots of Load

March Madness is a beast, given the sheer volume of games in a short time frame. As much as I’d like to know (and my bank account would like to know) who the winners of each matchup will be, all we can do is pre-stage each game. By pre-staging, that often means listing an event without knowing the matchup (or other information, like game time). Once do we get that final information and the matchups are set, that’s when activity kicks in.

Take Duke. Last week, Duke beat North Dakota State in the first round. By then, Duke’s second-round matchup was going to be either VCU or the University of Central Florida (UCF) — and that game was going to be decided just hours after Duke won their game. Once UCF won and their second-round matchup with Duke was set, StubHub saw a spike in the number of tickets sold for that game to nearly 400% between Friday and Saturday of last week.

That was possible because of our worldwide caching network, in which we were not only able to publish the info here in the U.S., but worldwide to the StubHub platform as well, in an instant.

Surfacing Relevant Events in Real Time

We recently modernized our homepage to make it more effective in promoting and generating traffic to specific targeted events. It’s essential that our advertising and content be tied to the inventory available.

For instance, during the entirety of the NCAA tournament, the banners and carousel on our homepage will promote the games from one round to the next. In the past, this required a software engineer pushing code in real time.

Because we’ve created a self-service content module for our modernized website, our marketing team can decide what they want to include in the carousel or on a banner. They can write something like, “You just saw Duke win on a buzzer-beater. Now it’s your time to beat the crowd for your own ticket!” (As you can tell, I’m a CIO, not an ad guy). Instead of pushing code, which can take hours, we have our marketing team push content to the homepage, which takes just seconds.

Auto-Scaling

Another capability we have created in this period of modernization is a new auto-scaling feature. Previously, we had a fixed amount of capacity in our private cloud. With our new infrastructure, we have the ability to support 10 times the amount of that peak. As we start transitioning into the public cloud, instead of having to build this all upfront, we can scale up and scale down on a given basis.

This is big for us, especially during March Madness, where our traffic can spike four to five times throughout a given week. We’ve built our infrastructure to handle this surge in activity at a constant level. It allows us to be able to handle multiple spikes at the same time.

StubHub is built for this. We’re always on because we have to be. After March Madness ends, the NFL will release its full schedule for the 2019 season. The MLB season is about to start. Then there are the NBA and NHL playoffs. As we expand internationally, we’re going to be handling tens of thousands of tickets for Premier League games, Champions League games, the upcoming Olympics, and the World Cup.

There’s always a big event happening somewhere. And to that I say: bring on the Madness!

Learn more about the author of this post, Marty Boos. Are you interested in collaborating on high-volume projects like March Madness as we modernize and build for the future? Come join us.