About a week after migrating to AWS, entradas.com had to deal with one of its biggest ticketing challenges. It was a soccer match that excited national interest: Spain versus Italy in the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifiers. Royán knew the demand for tickets would be huge. “In a way, it was the perfect storm,” he says. “It was a major game for Spain because it needed to win to qualify to play in the World Cup, and tickets were being sold for less than the normal price for club match tickets, which made the event affordable to a wider audience. And, because it was a national game, the whole stadium was available for sale. Arguably, we should have chosen a less-critical event as the first test of our infrastructure on AWS, but it was a complete success. We sold 50,000 tickets in two days for the Spain versus Italy World Cup qualifier, and at peak we were selling 500 tickets a minute.”

A key motivation for the move to AWS was enabling entradas.com to expand its reach in the sporting events segment. With its capacity to scale boosted—Royán estimates the company can handle 50 percent more traffic compared to what was possible on its physical infrastructure—entradas.com can now onboard new event organizers, promoters, and venue owners. Building relationships with customers also relies on being able to demonstrate best practices in security, and here too Royán sees the advantage of using AWS: “A professional cloud provider like AWS has hundreds of security engineers thinking about security solutions. This specialization at scale is something we can’t reproduce in-house. We feel secure using AWS and the businesses we work with are confident in the security of our systems, too.”

Since moving to AWS, entradas.com has benefited from the automated, managed nature of services that allow the company to make the most of its resources. “Before we used Amazon RDS, I employed a dedicated database manager to maintain a system that essentially didn’t add anything to the business. We don’t sell more tickets because we have a database, but the business couldn’t operate without it,” says Royán. Now, key systems run without a large IT management burden. “Our maintenance load has been reduced by 50 percent, which means 50 percent more time can be spent on work that benefits the business by improving our platform and adding new features. This is great for our competitiveness and for our customers.”