Case Study: Ticketfly achieves a massively scalable, low‑latency reserved‑seating engine with Akka

Typesafe helps ticket sales soar at Ticketfly

Ticketfly, an integrated ticketing and digital-marketing platform, needed to expand from General Admission into the much larger reserved-seating market — a domain with rapidly changing coordinated state, extreme bursty traffic during on‑sales, distributed seat availability, complex seat‑cluster search, and sophisticated bot attacks. These constraints made traditional database‑centric approaches inflexible, costly, and hard to scale.

Ticketfly rebuilt the reserved‑seating engine using Typesafe technologies (Scala + Akka) in a CQRS/event‑sourcing architecture, modeling seats and processes as finite‑state machines backed by actors and an in‑memory distributed seat graph. The small team delivered ~30k lines of Scala that performs concurrent, non‑blocking seat searches and allocations (under 20 ms), integrates other inventory systems, and provides the scalability and reliability Ticketfly needed.

Ticketfly

Andrew Headrick

Platform Architect