System Design Ticketmaster

What happens when a million people try to buy Taylor Swift tickets at the exact same moment? You'll design a complete ticket booking platform — from fast event search to preventing double-booking under extreme burst traffic. Each technology (Elasticsearch, distributed locks, virtual waiting rooms) is introduced when you need it to solve a specific problem. This is one of the most instructive system design problems because it combines extreme burst traffic, strict inventory consistency, and fairness.

5 sections · 16 lessons

Course outline

Foundation

  1. The Ticketmaster Problem
  2. Requirements & Core Entities
  3. API Design
  4. High-Level Architecture
  5. Foundation

Search & Data Flow

  1. Fast Search with Elasticsearch
  2. Keeping Search in Sync with CDC
  3. Caching & CDN
  4. Search & Data Flow

Booking & Consistency

  1. The Double-Booking Problem
  2. Distributed Locking with Redis
  3. Seat Hold & Timeout
  4. Database-Level Safety
  5. Booking & Consistency

Burst Traffic

  1. The Hot Partition Problem
  2. Virtual Waiting Room with Kafka
  3. Rate Limiting & Graceful Degradation
  4. Burst Traffic

Putting It Together

  1. Payment & Failure Handling
  2. The Complete Architecture
  3. Putting It Together

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