Intro
Croatia's largest venue and event ticketing platform, faced a critical operational challenge: their infrastructure team lacked the cloud expertise to manage unpredictable, high-intensity traffic spikes that accompany major event ticket releases. Incidents during peak sales windows - where thousands of users simultaneously attempt to purchase tickets - caused platform instability at exactly the moments that mattered most. Sedmi Odjel assumed full managed operations of client's AWS environment, delivering 24x7 monitoring, structured incident management, and proactive capacity planning that transformed platform reliability and enabled client to scale confidently with Croatia's biggest events.
The Problem
Client's engineering team was built for product development, not cloud operations. As the platform grew and the scale of hosted events increased, several critical gaps emerged:
- Unmanaged Traffic Spikes: Major event ticket releases generate sudden, intense traffic surges - hundreds or thousands of concurrent users hitting the platform simultaneously within seconds of a sale opening. Without proactive capacity planning and auto-scaling configuration, these spikes caused slowdowns and outages at peak revenue moments.
- Reactive Incident Handling: With no dedicated ops team or 24x7 monitoring, infrastructure incidents were discovered by users before engineers, leading to delayed response times and extended downtime during high-visibility events.
- No Formal Operations Processes: Infrastructure changes, patching, and access management were handled informally, creating security gaps and operational inconsistency across the environment.
- Backup and DR Gaps: No validated backup procedures or disaster recovery strategy were in place, exposing the business to data loss and extended recovery times in the event of a failure.
- Scaling Ops Without Scaling Headcount: As client's event portfolio grew, so did the operational complexity - but hiring and retaining dedicated cloud operations engineers in the Croatian market was neither practical nor cost-effective for the business.
Why AWS Cloud?
AWS provided the ideal foundation for client's managed operations engagement for several reasons:
- Elastic Scaling: AWS Auto Scaling and load balancing capabilities are purpose-built for the exact traffic pattern client experiences - sudden, predictable spikes followed by rapid cooldown - enabling the platform to absorb demand surges without over-provisioning year-round.
- Comprehensive Observability: Amazon CloudWatch provides deep visibility into infrastructure performance, enabling Sedmi Odjel to detect anomalies and respond before users are impacted.
- Managed Services Breadth: The depth of AWS managed services - from RDS for database operations to CloudFront for content delivery - reduces operational surface area and enables consistent, automated operations at scale.
- Security & Compliance: AWS security tooling supports the access governance, vulnerability management, and audit requirements appropriate for a platform handling payment-adjacent ticketing transactions.
- Cost Efficiency: AWS cost management tools enable right-sizing and spend optimization across an environment with highly variable traffic patterns, avoiding the cost of permanently over-provisioned infrastructure.
Solution
Sedmi Odjel assumed full operational responsibility for client's AWS environment under a comprehensive managed services engagement:
- Monitoring & Alerting: Continuous 24x7 monitoring of all platform components via Amazon CloudWatch with custom alerting thresholds tuned for client's traffic patterns, including pre-event surge detection and anomaly alerting during active sales windows.
- 24x7 Incident Management: Round-the-clock incident detection and resolution with defined SLAs, ensuring any platform degradation during event sales is identified and addressed within minutes - not hours.
- Capacity Planning: Proactive workload analysis and resource forecasting aligned to client's event calendar, ensuring infrastructure is scaled ahead of known high-demand events and right-sized during off-peak periods.
- Operations & Change Management: Structured resource management and a formal change process covering configuration updates, software installations, and system parameter changes - maintaining platform stability across all deployments.
- User and Access Management: Centralized identity governance including user provisioning/de-provisioning, MFA enforcement, and least-privilege access management across all AWS accounts.
- Patch & Vulnerability Management: Regular OS and database patching with security prioritization, plus scheduled security audits and vulnerability scanning with remediation planning.
- Backup, Restore & Disaster Recovery: Full implementation of backup procedures with periodic restore testing and a validated DR strategy with defined RTO/RPO targets for production workloads.
- Cost Management: Continuous spend monitoring, right-sizing recommendations, and cost-control measures to optimize infrastructure economics across variable traffic loads.
- DevOps & Infrastructure: Maintenance of CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes/container environments, and Infrastructure as Code configurations supporting client's development and release workflows.
- Reporting & Governance: Monthly operational reports, AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews, and security audit cycles providing full visibility into platform health and compliance posture.
Next Steps
With a stable, well-managed AWS foundation in place, client is positioned to continue growing its event portfolio and expand into new venue categories with confidence. Planned initiatives include further auto-scaling optimization ahead of large festival seasons, enhanced observability dashboards for real-time event monitoring, and continued Well-Architected improvement cycles to maintain platform excellence as the business scales.
Sedmi Odjel continues to partner with client as their trusted managed cloud operations provider, ensuring Croatia's leading ticketing platform delivers a reliable experience for every event, every sale, and every fan.
