BookMyShow, a leading entertainment company in India, provides an online ticketing platform for movies, plays, concerts, and sporting events. Selling up to 200 million tickets on an annual run rate basis (pre-Covid) to customers in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Middle East, BookMyShow also offers an online media streaming service and end-to-end management for virtual and on-ground entertainment experiences across all genres.
With on-premises servers that were often overprovisioned to cater to peak traffic volumes, BookMyShow saw an opportunity to reduce its technical debt and create a more elastic, cost-effective IT architecture. The company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Minfy Technologies, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and cloud specialist, to help migrate its data and applications to the AWS Cloud.
We want to give customers the best possible experience, and we chose AWS because it is just as customer obsessed as we are. AWS dove deep into our existing architecture to find us the most suitable solutions, while Minfy provided out-of-the-box tools to ensure a seamless migration.”
– Mahesh Chalil, Senior Vice President – Technology, BookMyShow
Running IT Infrastructure with Minimal Cost and Effort
Consolidating 200 TB of data from over 10 different databases into a single data lake in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), BookMyShow eliminated duplicate data copies and reduced storage needs by 75 percent.
By migrating to the cloud, the company exchanged costly capital expenditures upfront to a pay-as-you-go model, lowering its total cost of ownership by around 70 percent which includes compute cost reduction by 30 percent, using AWS Graviton2 instances to run workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and easily resizable cloud compute capacity.
In upgrading its 15 year-old analytics stack with services such as AWS Glue and Amazon Athena for data integration and analysis, the company streamlined its reporting processes to derive better business insights and eliminate latency issues. This resulted in subsequent reduction in customer complaints.
Mahesh Chalil, senior vice president – technology, at BookMyShow, explains, “We want to give customers the best possible experience, and we chose AWS because it is just as customer obsessed as we are. AWS dove deep into our existing architecture to find us the most suitable solutions, while Minfy provided out-of-the-box tools to ensure a seamless migration.”
Designing a Better Data Management Architecture
BookMyShow, together with Minfy, completed its migration without disruption to business operations over two phases. “One of our core principles is to help customers create their future and design their journey. We feel proud to have supported BookMyShow in its digital transformation journey by leveraging our AWS migration competency and Swayam, Minfy’s cloud management platform,” shared Vikram Manchanda, chief executive officer at Minfy.
The first phase, which involved rehosting the company’s website and services on the AWS Cloud, took four months and was completed in June 2021. BookMyShow used AWS Lake Formation to create a secure data lake, supported by Minfy. The company tapped Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) to operate end-to-end data pipelines, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run Kubernetes applications with zero administration.
In the second phase, BookMyShow redesigned its data analytics architecture on the AWS Cloud over a period of two months. The company now uses Amazon SageMaker and Amazon EMR to prepare and apply machine learning models to big data at speed. BookMyShow is also now able to access business intelligence insights in seconds with Amazon QuickSight.
By developing and testing proof-of-concept with AWS, the BookMyShow team successfully refined and accelerated the migration process.
Utsav Kesharwani, engineering manager, BookMyShow, says, “AWS provided plenty of valuable insights – from helping to optimize our server provisioning to anticipating every possible scenario and proposing contingency measures to minimize impact to our operations. Migrating to an efficient and highly secure setup allows us to focus on growing our business. We’ve reduced tedious data management tasks, freed up time to innovate further, and can easily maintain compliance with industry security regulations.”
Paving the Way for the Hybrid Entertainment Industry of the Future
Currently, BookMyShow is exploring the use of additional AWS managed services to continue improving its serverless architecture. The company is also planning to develop more machine-learning capabilities to help build better business offerings that meet changing audience needs.
Moving to the AWS Cloud has helped BookMyShow pivot from traditional out-of-home entertainment experiences to all-things-entertainment. Chalil states, “We’re now empowered to provide greater quality and variety of offerings for our customers at home. To us, this is a step in the right direction towards the future of the entertainment industry.”
