BookMyShow: Our Journey to the Cloud with AWS

Figure 1: BookMyShow (India) Journey to AWS Cloud

It’s been 22 years since BookMyShow’s parent company Big Tree Entertainment came into existence, with the vision to provide seamless and impeccable user experience across the entertainment ecosystem for consumers, organisers, partners and the entire value chain that builds India’s entertainment industry.

The first mover advantage in being the sole player to proactively digitise the entire entertainment value chain through an online ticketing service platform, set the stage for BookMyShow (BMS) to become the leading player among entertainment service providers in the country. Today, BMS is the go-to online entertainment platform for anyone interested in watching the latest movies, stand-up comedy, music concerts, live performances and sporting events. Apart from that, BMS also provides full stack and end-to-end management services for organizing live events and movies both out-of-home and virtual thus encompassing the entire landscape of entertainment.

Leading the way for the industry at such a massive scale consistently for over two decades requires constant innovation and being nimble to respond to market forces and changing consumer patterns swiftly. Here is a look at the winning metrics pre-pandemic for the BMS:

• On an annual run rate basis, BMS sells more than 200 million tickets making it the largest in the country.
• Gets 200 million customer visits and 5 billion page viewers on an average every month.
• January 2020 created history with the highest number of tickets ever sold at 23 million, for the first time on the platform.
• BMS sold 2.1 million movie tickets for a single day on January 12, 2020, the highest ever sold in one day with 7 consecutive days of 1 million tickets sold each day from January 10th until January 16th, 2020.

With the pandemic halting our traditional businesses over the past 15 months, there was the existence of time to implement the innovations we had always wanted to but never found the window to, in order to make the system more efficient, seamless and thus reduce costs significantly. We have always prided ourselves in having a robust product and technology backbone that has always helped us stay nimble, innovate and pivot swiftly and respond appropriately to any changing dynamic. The same held us in good stead as we worked on a vision of cost optimization on the back of this pandemic-induced reduction in consumer activity.

Typically, BMS has a cyclic pattern of consumer usage and traffic surge:

• Weekends are always heavier when it comes to ticket bookings as compared to weekdays.
• Across India, blockbuster Movie releases happen once every couple of weeks or months.
• Typically marquee, massive crowds and high demand Live Events across genres (Music concerts, Cricket IPL series etc) take place once or twice in a year.

While a public cloud environment is a sure short answer to significant cost saving advantages, there are several long term considerations to this decision:

• Cloud environment allows BMS’ technology teams to stay focused on building Products & Capabilities for customers that offer maximum comfort and seamlessness. There is a significant reduction in the time and effort spent to manage the infrastructure.
• Access to various AWS cloud services related to Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Media processing, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and many more increase the pace and extent of innovation in both, core & emerging products including TVOD-Stream, AdTech, Contents-Buzz, Voice interface, Personalization etc.
• The usage of modern technology like the AWS cloud services, aids in attracting and retaining a pool of talented individuals who are instrumental in building BMS.

Cost effectiveness (Say No to CapEx; and Elastic OpEx)

• No CapEx: Compared to our colocation data center, the public cloud environment requires no upfront investments to buy hardware, network gear, storage, internet connections and renting space in data centres amongst others.
• Elastic OpEx: The monthly recurring cost remains proportional to the customer traffic or revenue accrued due to the public cloud’s pay-as-you-go billing model.

BMS has already been experimenting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in a limited capacity. A comparative analysis (Pugh Matrix) of these leading cloud provider’s services against the set of BMS’ requirements was followed by multiple discussions with both the partners’ technical & business teams. A thorough conversation helped team BMS lock in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the public cloud partner for India’s largest entertainment platform.

The entire AWS migration process consist of two phases:

• Phase I is known as “Lift-and-shift / Re-hosting” of BMS site & services from colocation data center to AWS.
• Phase II is known as “Re-factor / Re-Architecture” of BMS services to optimize further & adopt AWS cloud native technologies, as appropriate.

Phase I took about four months and was successfully completed on June 9, 2021. We are now working on Phase II of the migration process. This blog is a prologue to the start of “BMS’ Journey to the Cloud with AWS”. Stay tuned for more blog posts and AWS Case Study in the coming weeks.

Figure 2: Phase I of cloud migration successfully completed on June 9, 2021

Appreciation and Recognition (#DreamTeam): Over the past several years the colocation data centres’ infrastructure has been developed into a complex and hard one to deal with. The migration to the AWS cloud environment could not have been possible without contributions from the entire BMS team to turn it into a reality. A massive thank you to all the passionate and dedicated BMS Technology team members for the immense effort & huge success:

• From Development Team (Utsav, Imran, Vijay, Ketan, Ralstan, Aditya, Vaibhav, Abhijit, Kalp, Valerian, Kunal, Kamal and the entire team)
• QA (Zaid, Aasim, Sachin, Aqtar, Manesh, Robin, Vikas and the entire team)
• DevOps (Yagnesh, Rohini, Pranav, Nikhil and the entire team)
• DBA (Birendra, Arvin)
• NetOps (Shailesh, Riyaz)
• SecOps (Varun, Bhowmik)
• TPM (Kalpesh, Suketu) & Tech Write (Riddhi)
• Finance (Saurabh)

This cloud migration journey wouldn’t have been possible without the support from:

• AWS ProServe team (Atul, Badal, Kaushal, Yogesh)
• TechMinfy-AWS Partner team(Anant, Dharshan, Sekhar, Murali, Bharath, Ramit and the entire team)
• AMD (Sanjiv M): For our compute workloads, we preferred AMD (EPYC) series processor instances, as they provide the leading x86 price-performance ratio.

Special thanks to the cloud migration joint Steering Committee Leadership team (Mahesh & Naren) for the guidance and inspiration throughout the entire migration journey.

Article written by Ashish Gite