Case Study: Fandango achieves rapid scalability and stability with Elastic Cloud (Elastic)

Fandango - Customer Case Study

Fandango, the movie-focused digital network serving 60M+ monthly visitors, was running a large on‑prem Elasticsearch stack (15–20TB, 100M+ documents/day) that struggled with massive, short-lived traffic spikes from marketing and blockbuster releases. The company faced integration across global business units, slow hardware-driven elasticity, cluster instability (heap spikes, long GC pauses and hangs), and the need for secure, easy upgrades and consistent mappings across environments.

To fix this they moved to Elastic Cloud in a single weekend, working with Elastic support to address Shield and mapping issues and adopting a hybrid strategy: production logs to both cloud and on‑prem for redundancy, dev/staging on‑prem, and long‑term snapshots to S3/Glacier with short cloud retention to control costs. The migration restored visibility during spikes, delivered much faster scaling and deployment, improved stability and uptime, and set a roadmap for upgrades (5.x), Kafka and Logstash 5.x integration, and hot/warm architecture to further reduce costs.

Fandango

Adam Kane

Director of Engineering