WRSTBND Seamlessly Facilitates Large-Scale Event Access with Mendix on AWS

WRSTBND is using Mendix, a Siemens company, on AWS to manage access to some of the world’s most significant events. The company’s device, powered by radio-frequency identification (RFID), helps event organizers handle crucial tasks such as access control and credentialing. Rather than creating client-specific applications, WRSTBND wanted a versatile system that could be tailored to each client. Using the Mendix platform, it built a multitenant, microservices-based architecture, powered by AWS services like Amazon EKS and AWS IoT Core. With more than 90 percent of its events using the new architecture, WRSTBND has significantly enhanced the quality of its field services.

WRSTBND facilitates access to some of the world’s largest events using an RFID-powered device, customized for each attendee. By using the company’s platform, event organizers can effectively manage several essential services, such as cashless payments, contactless access control, and credential management.

Since the beginning, WRSTBND has searched for better, faster, and bigger ways to serve event organizers. To power its wrist-worn services in the field, the company often developed custom, client-specific applications for different events.

Developing individual applications was time consuming, so WRSTBND chose to pivot and adopt a unified system that could be customized to fulfill the requirements of each client. The company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partner Mendix to build the new architecture within its RFID platform. Using Mendix’s low-code application development platform, WRSTBND implemented a microservices architecture that can scale seamlessly to communicate with thousands of devices operating in the field. Now, WRSTBND can provide a fast, reliable service for events of all sizes, including a 3-day music festival with 125,000 daily attendees.

Founded in 2005, Mendix provides solutions that empower development teams to build better apps at a faster pace. Its low-code, cloud-native platform helps accelerate all phases of the development life cycle, helping companies like WRSTBND deliver compelling experiences across digital touchpoints. Mendix has worked with WRSTBND since its inception, having served as the foundation for a series of event management applications for the founders’ first company, Solomon Group. The success of those applications led to the founding of WRSTBND, which offers event management technology powered by AWS. “Knowing how quickly things can change in the event industry, we felt like we would never be able to design enough functionality and have enough flexibility,” says Conway Solomon, cofounder and CEO of WRSTBND. “Writing our own application in raw code wasn’t an option. Then, we discovered Mendix and quickly built an application specifically for that festival.”

After this engagement, WRSTBND chose to engage Mendix for each of its events, creating a custom application for each event. “When Mendix migrated to AWS completely in 2016, we saw a huge improvement in the reliability and speed of all our instances and nodes,” says Jonathan Foucheaux, cofounder and chief technology officer of WRSTBND. During the event standstill caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, WRSTBND saw an opportunity to simplify and innovate further by adopting one solution to support all applications for every event. To achieve this goal, it worked with Mendix to develop an advanced event technology architecture powered by AWS.

Using WRSTBND’s RFID-powered devices, event organizers can efficiently manage key tasks such as ticketing, entry control, transactions, and alerts. Within these wristbands, a multitenant architecture operates seven to eight microservices; each microservice is a Mendix application run using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in AWS and on-premises data centers. The microservices manage specific components of an event and communicate with one another to deliver a secure and seamless experience to both organizers and attendees.

For example, WRSTBND uses AWS IoT Core, which connects billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and routes trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure, to facilitate near-real-time communication in the field. The company uses AWS IoT Core to push near-real-time Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messaging down to its devices. “Depending on the size of the show, we might handle one million to two million MQTT messages per event, and sometimes much more than that,” says Foucheaux. Each device scans an event goer’s wristband, determines whether they have a valid ticket, assigns a unique code, and uses AWS IoT Core to post the data to the system so that multiple people can’t use the same ticket. If someone tries to use the same ticket twice, WRSTBND’s microservices architecture automatically pulls the ticket data and uses AWS IoT Core to alert event staff of an attempted unauthorized entry.

The architecture’s database layers are powered by serverless Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. More than 90 percent of WRSTBND’s events are powered by this advanced architecture, which seamlessly scales to support thousands of event goers. At its biggest event ever, a 3-day music festival in Saudi Arabia, WRSTBND scaled to support 1.1 million scans across 200 devices spread over a 500-acre area, which is the size of a large theme park. All these remote scans were posted to its system in less than 1 second. “We had no issues at all with the scalability and had minimal latency,” says Foucheaux. “No more than 1 second from someone scanning in the field, we would see that data posted to the system. That was a huge success for such a large event.”

Using Mendix’s low-code environment, WRSTBND has vastly improved its speed to launch new features for its six-person development team. The company can get features into production in as little as 3–4 hours and can release complex microservices within months. “We can get a lot done for such a small team because of Mendix,” says Foucheaux. “We’re able to create new features and push out releases every week. We have six people on our team, and if we were trying to do all this alone, we’d probably need 18–20 people to deliver the same output we get with Mendix.” In fact, WRSTBND has reduced its development timelines from days or weeks to a matter of hours. For the music festival in Saudi Arabia, the company could change a feature in less than 24 hours. It also built a new payment processing microservice in less than 2 months.

With its multitenant architecture in place, WRSTBND will continue to deliver seamless, scalable event experiences using its simple wrist-worn bracelet. The company is seeking to enhance its service by investigating novel capabilities and features. Its next step is to adopt AWS Private 5G, a managed service that makes it simple to deploy, operate, and scale a private mobile network, to offer improved connectivity at large events.

WRSTBND is revolutionizing the event-goer experience on AWS, and its new architecture will serve as a powerful foundation as it works with organizers in the future. Its clients report extreme satisfaction with the system; the company enjoys a 95–96 percent retention rate and 30–40 percent growth in its client base every year. “When we look at the overwhelming return of our clients and then add that to our yearly growth, it’s clear that our clients are happy with the solution that we’ve adopted,” says Solomon.