What's Regtix Made Of?

February 21st, 2011 by David

Everyone always asks, "What kind of setup is running the back end of Regtix?" Okay, very few people ever ask that. But for those who do care, here it is:

Why does it matter?

How software is built matters. It matters a lot. And while there is no "best programming language" or "best operating system", your choices in these things do matter. At Regtix, our choices are driven by specific technical objectives. For example, our software needs to be fast. Our software needs to be scalable. And our software needs to be extremely flexible.

Based on these and other objectives, here are some the choices we've made for Regtix:

Hosting Platform: Amazon Web Services

Most people don't know that Amazon provides an amazingly innovative and reliable platform to build and host websites and web software that can scale to handle almost any load. When we first started working with Amazon, we were excited to use their virtual server offering and, at the time, they were offering a few additional services as well. But in the few years we've been using them, we've been blown away by how forward-thinking and innovative they are when it comes to releasing new products and updates to their existing products. Sometimes we feel like they can read our minds. Just when we feel like we're running into a technical challenge, Amazon will release a product or update that solves our problem.

Sure, there are other "cloud" providers out there. But we've done the research and we know that, at least for now, no one else comes close to stacking up against what Amazon has to offer.

Specific services we use on Amazon include:

• EC2
  Regtix utilizes a combination of Windows and Linux servers to run a variety of application features, including this website, our event management website, the individual event ticketing websites, local and distributed memcache, and many other systems and process.
• RDS
  Regtix utilizes Amazon's managed database service to run most of our data back end. We take advantage of many RDS features, including Multiple Availability Zone deployment and automated backups.
• Simple DB
  Much of our secure entry systems are controlled using Amazon's non-relational, highly available database system.
• S3 and CloudFront
  Amazon S3 is a central component in our software. In addition to storing all event-specific graphics and documents in S3, we utilize S3 and CloudFront as a caching mechanism for our print-at-home ticket service. We also utilize CloudFront to dynamically store re-sized version of images.
• Many Others
  Regtix depends on many other services provided by Amazon, including Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53, CloudWatch, and SES.

Programming Language: PHP

We're not the first programmers to figure out how powerful PHP is when it comes to building fast, scalable, and flexible applications. We could go on and on about this point, but the bottom line is that we've worked with most other popular web programming platforms and, for us, PHP takes the cake.

It doesn't hurt knowing that Facebook and many other of our favorite web apps are powered by PHP.

Database: MySQL

It goes without saying that MySQL and PHP are a match made in heaven. On top of that, MySQL is the platform provided by Amazon's RDS service (Oracle is coming soon). But again, having worked with a variety of other database platforms before, it's been clear from the beginning that Regtix should be built on MySQL. Someday soon I'll go into more detail about how Regtix uses simple data structures and a distributed architecture to ensure that each and every event we service provides lightning fast response times even under heavy loads.

Other Components

We try to keep things as simple as possible. We avoid introducing additional components at all costs. But with a system like Regtix, you can't avoid working with a variety of components and systems to accomplish what is required:

• Memcached
  We utilize memcached for both local (on each application server instance) and distributed (central caching servers) data caching. Combining both setups allows us to reduce the load on our central database servers by as much as 95% and provide extremely fast response times virtual every request made to a Regtix system.
• WordPress
  While we don't use the WordPress front end, we utilize WordPress as a content management system. For example, we use WordPress to manage all of the content on this site and this blog. By utilizing a combination of WordPress plugins that help it leverage Amazon's S3 service with our own WordPress API, we're able to take advantage of WordPress for its strengths without worrying about scalability issues.
• JQuery
  To keep our code base as light as possible, we avoid using frameworks and heavy libraries on both the back end and the front end of our system. But when it comes to scripting in the browser, JQuery is invaluable.

Regtix is built and maintained using a wide variety of systems and services. Over time, I hope to go into more detail about the individual components that make Regtix so fast, so reliable, and so easy to use.