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 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:
AWS provided an ideal set of services to help meet these system performance testing challenges, including:
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.
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