Virtual Waiting Room Architecture That Handles High-Demand Ticket Sales at SeatGeek

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

The virtual waiting room at SeatGeek handles high-demand ticket sales by absorbing traffic spikes, providing a fair ticket-selling process, and preventing service outages. It utilizes a tech stack consisting of AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and Fastly CDN. The workflow involves routing client traffic to the virtual waiting room, registering user positions in the queue, exchanging visitor tokens for access tokens, and validating access tokens for entry into the protected zone where tickets can be purchased. The use of a leaky bucket controls the number of users entering the protected zone.