Event Platform Case Study
Transforming Billetto's Architecture with Event Sourcing and Event-Driven Design
Billetto × Arkency — 12+ years of partnership transforming a legacy ticketing platform into a scalable, event-driven system with zero-downtime deployments.
Executive Summary
Billetto, a leading subculture event marketplace and ticketing platform in the Nordics, faced challenges with maintaining a large codebase, high response times, and handling traffic spikes. Arkency provided full-stack software architecture expertise, transitioning Billetto to an event-driven approach, improving CI/CD pipelines, and optimizing system performance.
Key Results:
- Full CI/CD — each commit deployed to production automatically after passing tests.
- Rolling deploys — zero downtime, no maintenance mode needed.
- Optimized response times — migrated operations to background jobs.
- Enhanced maintainability — modularized codebase with clear context separation.
About Billetto
Billetto is a leading event marketplace and ticketing platform in the Nordics, catering to subcultures, independent event organizers, and communities. The platform enables users to discover events, purchase tickets, and manage event logistics seamlessly.
Challenges
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Legacy Codebase Complexity:
- A large and complex legacy codebase that made feature development slow.
- An aging, custom-built system that was difficult to maintain and scale.
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Performance Issues:
- High response times affecting user experience.
- Traffic spikes that could overload the system, especially during popular event launches.
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Deployment Challenges:
- Slow and risky deployment processes requiring maintenance windows.
- Difficulty in implementing new features without disrupting the existing system.
Billetto's objective was to modernize their architecture, improve performance, and enable rapid, reliable deployments while ensuring long-term maintainability.
Services Provided
Software Architecture
Transition to an event-driven architecture.
Backend & Frontend Development
Refactoring and modularization.
DevOps & CI/CD Optimization
Enhancing deployment pipelines.
Product Collaboration
Planning new features with scalability in mind.
Technology & Tools
The Team
- Team Size
- A small team of 4-6 developers to maintain and develop the platform efficiently.
- Duration
- 12 years and ongoing.
How We Helped
Incremental, high-impact improvements:
- Shifting from a CRUD-based system to an event-driven architecture to improve scalability and maintainability.
- Introducing background job processing to reduce response times and handle heavy workloads more efficiently.
- Developing a custom EventStore, which provided a solid foundation for audit logs and historical tracking of user operations.
- Implementing a fully automated CI/CD pipeline, allowing every successful commit to be deployed without manual intervention.
Results
1. Deployment & Infrastructure Improvements
- Continuous Deployment: every commit goes directly to production after passing tests.
- Rolling Deployments: updates applied with zero downtime.
- Live Data Migrations: schema changes no longer require maintenance windows.
2. Performance Enhancements
- Improved Response Times: moving tasks to background jobs significantly reduced frontend latency.
- Optimized Read Operations: introducing read models improved response times for data-heavy pages.
3. Development & Maintainability
- Faster Feature Development: clear modularization and separated contexts enabled easier expansion.
- A small team of 4-6 developers efficiently maintains and develops the platform.
- Event-driven architecture provided full audit logs of user operations.
"It is rare to find a technical partner where the collaboration feel like an extension of our own company.
Having worked +12 years alongside Arkency building out the Billetto platform I can endorse Arkency as a trusted strategic and operational partner."
Benefits
Technical Benefits
- A more scalable, event-driven architecture.
- Better system resilience with background job processing.
- Easier maintenance and debugging due to clear separation of concerns.
Business Benefits
- Faster time-to-market for new features.
- Reduced operational costs by enabling a smaller team to handle a large codebase.
- Higher platform reliability, leading to better user experience and increased sales.
Why Arkency?
Event Sourcing Expertise
Deep knowledge in Event Sourcing and Domain-Driven Design to build scalable architectures that last.
Long-Term Partnership
Proven track record of long-term collaborations, helping businesses evolve their platforms for over a decade.
Ruby on Rails Mastery
Deep expertise in Ruby on Rails and modern architectures to build robust, maintainable systems.
Full-Stack Capabilities
Comprehensive expertise from architecture and backend to CI/CD and DevOps for complete system transformation.
Incremental Improvement
Focus on incremental, risk-free improvements rather than disruptive "big-bang" rewrites.
Ready to Transform Your System?
If you're facing challenges with a legacy system or want to modernize with Event Sourcing, let's talk.