StubHub: Providing reliable, fast ticket purchase services with next-gen cloud technology
About StubHub
StubHub is one of the largest and most recognizable ticket exchange and resale platforms in the United States, providing ticketing services to buyers and sellers for sports, concerts, and other live events.
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About Intel
Intel Corporation, a Google Cloud Technology Partner, is known as a market leader and one of the world’s best-known chip producers, but Intel does much more. Harnessing the capability of the cloud and the ubiquity of the Internet of Things, Intel is disrupting industries and solving global challenges.
StubHub runs its Oracle applications and databases on the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution powered by Intel to improve service reliability, functionality, and efficiency.
Google Cloud results
- Runs 1,500 Intel general purpose machines for production and non-production workloads
- Reduces costs and resource demands for IT management
- Frees DevOps and other teams to focus on platform improvements that benefit ticket sellers and buyers
Optimizes scaling to meet customer demand quickly and efficiently
Deploying and managing IT infrastructure presents some of the biggest costs and most pressing challenges for companies today. Fortunately, cloud computing offers organizations the opportunity to optimize their infrastructure, especially when it comes to enabling better performance and scalability to address changing market demands.
StubHub, a ticketing giant that provides resale and exchange services for concerts, sporting matches, and other events, understands the importance of efficient scaling more than most. Peaks in demand for services happen frequently and unpredictably, from the moment popular events are announced. The flexibility to handle surges and scale down systems when demand is low is vital to StubHub’s success.
“The cost to increase capacity in our on-prem data center made it difficult to efficiently scale our infrastructure amid spikes and drops in demand,” says Todd Northcutt, Head of Product at StubHub. “We quickly recognized that cloud computing offered an unparalleled ability to scale to meet customer demand. In response, we chose to migrate our systems into the cloud.”
After a successful implementation of BigQuery to optimize its data analytics workflows, StubHub sought to modernize its applications with a focus on migrating its Oracle workloads. StubHub identified the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution for Oracle powered by Intel as the best option since the solution was able to be tuned from a CPU core processor perspective to meet the requirements. The Bare Metal Solution is a fully managed, certified, and state-of-the-art infrastructure that drives performance improvements for Oracle applications and databases.
“Intel technology is everywhere. Their ubiquity enables our platform and services to operate smoothly and seamlessly after our migration to the cloud. We had very few issues throughout the migration, and Intel delivered on its promise to power the data center of the future today.”
—Todd Northcutt, Senior Director, Head of Product, StubHubOverhauling legacy applications and infrastructure
Since 2000, StubHub has sustained tremendous growth year-over-year, translating to the need to manage more customers and events.
“Live event searches were becoming larger and more frequent, while our ability to scale on-prem hardware and our overall data center was just not there,” says Todd. “Scale was the primary challenge that pushed us into the cloud. We needed to solve for that problem fast.”
StubHub faced an accelerated timeline and was particularly focused on migrating its Oracle databases, given how essential it is to supporting direct services for ticket buyers and sellers. Virtually all of StubHub’s customer-facing services, such as ticketing systems and search engines within the platform, run through Oracle databases and applications.
Given the size of the platform, the need to efficiently run Oracle databases and seamlessly integrate all applications in the cloud, the Bare Metal Solution stood out as the ideal solution.
Migrating to the Bare Metal Solution with the help of Intel and Google Cloud removed the need to rewrite all of StubHub’s applications to work with other database technologies. This helped to ensure a smooth and fast migration from start to finish.
StubHub also benefited from previously running all of its applications and a majority of its third-party apps on Intel within its on-premises infrastructure, as this made the migration to cloud even easier.
“Intel technology is everywhere,” says Todd. “Their ubiquity enables our platform and services to operate smoothly and seamlessly after our migration to the cloud. We had very few issues throughout the migration, and Intel delivered on its promise to power the data center of the future today.”
“There’s no question that our applications now run on superior hardware with Google Cloud and Intel compared to our previous environment.”
—Todd Northcutt, Senior Director, Head of Product, StubHubAfter a fast migration, StubHub overcame its scalability challenges. It now runs roughly 1,000 Intel general purpose machines for production and 500 for non-production. On the database side, it has about 14 machines of various sizes to power 96 cores and manage four TBs of data.
Google Cloud provides auto scaling to match demand as it rises and falls, reducing waste and improving performance for StubHub customers. When demand is high, the application scales up, translating to better experiences when looking to purchase event tickets. When demand is low, it scales down, resulting in lower overall costs for StubHub.
“There’s no question that our applications run on superior hardware with Google Cloud and Intel compared to our previous environment,” says Todd. “We’re able to scale hardware up and down to meet constantly changing demands, which is not something we used to be able to do. At the same time, Google Cloud and Intel provide a far more cost-effective solution while ensuring high performance.”
The migration of Oracle to the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution powered by Intel provides several advantages, including enhanced storage and memory availability, as well as CPU power. To date, StubHub has modernized about half of its IT environment to take advantage of native Google Cloud services, increasing scalability while lowering costs.
“We saw a 64 percent improvement in performance running Oracle workloads on the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution compared to our legacy solution,” says Todd. “We now intend to use the Bare Metal Solution with Intel to support all of our Oracle workloads.”
Security, licensing, and functional improvements in the cloud
StubHub takes advantage of embedded authentication, authorization, and security functionality within the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution along with on-premises security and network scanning to maintain a strong overall security posture post-migration. Implementing the same types of access controls seen in its on-premises environments but adapted to the cloud helped to ensure accessibility without risking services.
The Bare Metal Solution also helped StubHub from a licensing standpoint. “We leveraged our existing Oracle licenses for our new Google Cloud environment thanks to the Bare Metal Solution. This really pushed the solution forward,” says Todd. “Not having to spend more for new license types was a big plus for us.”
In addition, performance monitoring was improved by out-of-the-box solutions that come with the Bare Metal Solution from Google Cloud and Intel. In its on-premises environment, StubHub relied on many siloed logs to monitor performance; this approach was replaced by the monitoring tools built into Google Cloud.
“We saved a lot of time during our migration because we did not have to rebuild all our old tooling and reports,” says Todd. “From a system management perspective, overhead has been reduced and our team spends much less time managing and scaling services now that we work with Google Cloud and Intel.”
While StubHub saw many performance and enterprise improvements after the migration, greatly improved scalability stands out as the primary benefit of moving to Google Cloud and Intel. As events started to tick up substantially over the summer of 2021, StubHub saw competitors struggling to manage demand.
“Thanks to the Bare Metal Solution, we can effectively manage spikes in demand,” says Todd. “We can quickly bring more servers and applications online to effortlessly handle popular events.”
“Our business has always been focused on reliability and performance. Google Cloud and Intel enable us to take this commitment to new heights.”
—Todd Northcutt, Senior Director, Head of Product, StubHubInnovating ticket resale and exchange services
All told, StubHub saw its platform availability increase, page load times and response times on APIs accelerate, and the costs of running its service decrease. At the same time, StubHub has enjoyed other transformations across its business due to the agility and efficiency gains of migrating to Google Cloud.
For example, engineers and other employees spend more time improving user experiences and developing new customer services thanks to more automated infrastructure management. Through Google Cloud solutions, StubHub has achieved continuous deployment capabilities for ticket buyers and sellers.
“Some look at the ability to get code into production faster as the ultimate goal, but we do not. We view the main goal as getting the most value to customers as fast as possible,” says Todd. “With Google Cloud, we can add a new feature and have it instantly available to all of our customers. That would have been impossible in our old environment.”
By running on the Google Cloud Bare Metal Solution powered by Intel, with its enterprise-grade deployment platform, StubHub is now in an even better position to serve customers as a reliable source of event tickets. Given the importance of reliability in this fast-paced, competitive market, the digital transformation strengthens Stubhub’s reputation as an innovator.
“The last thing we want is to disappoint customers, especially in our market where passionate fans are trying to see their favorite teams or musicians,” says Todd. “Our business has always been focused on reliability and performance. Google Cloud and Intel enable us to take this commitment to new heights.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About StubHub
StubHub is one of the largest and most recognizable ticket exchange and resale platforms in the United States, providing ticketing services to buyers and sellers for sports, concerts, and other live events.
About Intel
Intel Corporation, a Google Cloud Technology Partner, is known as a market leader and one of the world’s best-known chip producers, but Intel does much more. Harnessing the capability of the cloud and the ubiquity of the Internet of Things, Intel is disrupting industries and solving global challenges.