AWS Case Study: Ticketmaster and MarketShare
The Business Challenges
The Pricemaster application is a web-based tool designed to optimize live event ticket pricing, improve yield management and generate incremental revenue. The tool takes a holistic approach to maximizing ticket revenue: it optimizes pre-sale and initial pricing all the way through dynamic pricing post on-sale.
However, before development could begin, MarketShare had to find an infrastructure that could support the application’s dual challenges: limited upfront capital and managing the fluctuating nature of analytic workloads.
Amazon Web Services
After examining their options, MarketShare decided to power Pricemaster using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS feature stack provides the scalability, usability, and on-demand pricing required to support the application’s intricate cluster architecture and complex MATLAB simulations.
Pricemaster’s AWS environment includes four large and extra large Amazon EC2 instances supporting a variety of nodes. The diagram below reveals the Amazon EC2 configuration:
The pricing application’s Amazon EC2 instances are connected to a central database within Amazon Amazon RDS. In addition, Pricemaster’s AWS infrastructure includes Amazon ELB for traffic distribution, Amazon SimpleDB for non-relational data storage, Amazon Elastic MapReduce for large-scale data processing, as well as Amazon SES. The Pricemaster team monitors all of these resources with Amazon CloudWatch.
The diagram below details the application’s AWS-based architecture.
The Business Benefits
The Pricemaster team credits AWS’s ease of use, specifically that of Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Amazon RDS, with reducing its developers’ infrastructure management time by three hours per day—valuable hours the developers can now spend expanding the capabilities of the Pricemaster solution.
With AWS’s on-demand pricing, MarketShare also estimates that it reduces costs by over 80% annually, compared to fixed service costs. As the Pricemaster tool continues to grow, the company anticipates even further savings with Amazon Web Services.
MarketShare continues to expand its use of AWS for partners such as Ticketmaster saving time, money and providing a superior solution that is flexible, secure and scalable.
To learn more, visit http://www.marketshare.com 
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Added January 27, 2012
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