About The John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts
The Kennedy Center is the nation's busiest performing arts center, hosting approximately 2,000 events each year for audiences numbering more than 2 million. Since 1971, we have been bringing the world to Washington with magnificent performances of music, dance, theater, and more.
The Kennedy Center was preparing for the launch of a multi-week performance which was likely to generate a high number of ticket purchases in a very short window (measured in hours). The system supporting the ticket sales was a hybrid system, consisting of both 3rd party and internally developed applications running across multiple systems. The organization needed a cost-effective way to assess which system components had the largest impact on performance and scalability. Once identified, The Kennedy Center needed a mechanism to make changes and test the performance impact of those changes.
The Challenge
The Kennedy Center needed a solution which supported the ability to test and retest the ticketing system in a way that allowed us to analyze the impact of any software or configuration changes we made. This presented a number of challenges, including:
- Seats selection was a part of the ticket sale process and each seat could only be bought once per performance. So all data needed to be reset before any load tests were executed
- The environment would need to be reset after each test run, and the reset process should be as fast and as automated as possible
- General system and network attributes needed to be monitored as well as performance counters of specific application services.
The Solution
AWS provided an ideal set of services to help meet these system performance testing challenges, including:
- Building a CloudFormation template of the baseline system configuration provided a fast and automated way to reset the testing environment to a known state
- Setting up LoadRunner clusters provided a means to generate customized traffic at any required load configuration and duration
- A combination of pushing AWS CloudWatch Advanced Metrics and using 3rd party performance monitoring tools allowed for the required top-down and bottom-up visibility into the location of performance bottlenecks.
The Benefits
Benefit 1 - The CloudFormation template was designed to stand up multiple isolated versions of the testing environment for parallel load testing runs. The would allow multiple simultaneous loads, operating under different configurations, to be executed for increased testing and analysis efficiency.
Benefit 2 - Demonstrated the viability of running the ticketing solution and back office systems entirely within AWS or in a hybrid configuration, in which case AWS could provide a functioning DR solution.
Benefit 3 - Kickstep was able to isolate the key system which impacted sustained, large volume purchases and present remediation solutions prior to the production launch of the ticketing sales.
About Kickstep Technologies, Inc and Amazon Web Services
Kickstep Technologies is a leading technology firm providing cloud consulting, software development, data analytics and machine learning services. We use our experience to ensure clients have the best technical solutions to solve their business challenges and deliver value for their organization. We are fully committed to the success of our clients and commit to always putting their needs and interests before our own.