Modernizing a .NET App to Better Serve Arts and Culture Orgs Using AWS with Tessitura

Tessitura provides arts and culture organizations with a tailor-made system for customer relationship management. The solution combines ticketing, marketing, fundraising, and other capabilities into a single unified system. Tessitura began with seven founding member organizations and now supports 800, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Zoo, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Old Vic theatre, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Its members are located in 10 countries—including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Scandinavia—across six AWS Regions.

In 2021, Tessitura migrated its then-500 members to AWS in 11 months, transforming its growing community. “We were reimagining where we wanted to invest our time and resources—realizing that we don’t need to be experts on racking servers,” says Jeff Oliver, vice president of hosting at Tessitura. “And that, coupled with the power of the tool set that AWS provided, drove the strategic decision for us to migrate to AWS.” This initial lift-and-shift migration was just the beginning because the organization saw that true transformation would require rethinking its approach to infrastructure, development, and team collaboration, especially as it continued to onboard new members. Tessitura also prioritized cost optimization, aiming to improve efficiency in using dedicated hosts and reduce licensing costs by refactoring its application.

To kick-start its modernization journey, Tessitura chose to focus first on TNEW, a .NET application. This first project would tackle two common challenges across Tessitura’s portfolio: automating deployments that previously required many manual steps and addressing how different teams worked independently with their own technology stacks, which made collaboration and standardization challenging.

Tessitura participated in Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA), a program for accelerating cloud journeys with an outcome-focused transformation methodology, to complete TNEW’s modernization. Through this program, Tessitura established new ways of working that would shape its entire modernization journey. “EBA was the first time we had members from the development, infrastructure, operations, and information security teams collaborating on a large-scale project,” says Tyrell Hills, systems engineer III at Tessitura.

“The program was a big deal for us. It got us to work together in a way that we’ve never done before,” adds José Cepeda, senior software engineering manager at Tessitura. “The collaborative approach is now baked into the way we work.” Building on this new collaborative foundation, the organization migrated TNEW to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, and implemented AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service. Tessitura is using AWS Lambda to break the infrastructure behind TNEW into smaller services, making it simpler to manage.

That project has demonstrated the wins that are possible through modernization. For example, the organization reduced TNEW compute costs by 54 percent for each member. With containerization, Tessitura unlocked automatic scaling, which cut costs because Tessitura can scale down when resources aren’t needed rather than running unnecessary instances. The scalability also facilitates good customer experiences for people buying tickets from Tessitura members: Because the solution can handle large bursts in traffic, the system has a higher overall capacity and more consistent performance, and there is less need for people to wait in online queues or waitlists to get tickets. “The cost savings are great, the improvements to scalability are good, but the most exciting thing is how our teams work together after this project,” says Oliver. “The other results all flow from that.”

Tessitura reduced TNEW deployment times from 4 hours to under 5 minutes using services such as AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), a service that is used to define cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. The organization deployed 75 sites—including all infrastructure—in 15 minutes total. The TNEW deployment process was reduced by several orders of magnitude, from thousands of lines of code to just tens of lines, and server upgrades and patching can be run with virtually no downtime. The team also automated the manual process of onboarding a new member, which now takes just one line of code.

Using Amazon ECS, Tessitura has been able to run real-world disaster recovery testing. Logging also improved, and the support team now has additional data to troubleshoot issues. “We’ve seen containers in Amazon ECS be robust, and if one fails, another comes up in its place,” says Hills.

Building on the success of TNEW, Tessitura is now applying the same modernization principles across its entire application portfolio. To further decrease costs, Tessitura is also testing AWS Graviton processors, which are custom-designed server processors developed by AWS to provide excellent price performance for cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2. With the time saved through automated deployments and improved efficiency, Tessitura’s development team can now focus on other innovation priorities. Cost savings are being invested in new work that addresses the business-critical needs of the company’s arts and culture users and enhances their experience, including exploring new generative artificial intelligence features.

The collaborative practices and cloud-based approaches developed during the TNEW project have become the foundation for Tessitura’s broader transformation. “I’m excited for my team members to continue building their skills in managing infrastructure at scale,” says Stacey Voigt, director of hosting technology at Tessitura. “This journey has been a chance for everyone to examine the offerings that AWS has and get creative about how we might apply them to our solution.”