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Be•atEight websites and ticketing platform for the Belgian venue management market leader
Be•at
Solutions architecture | Content modelling | Development
Contentful | Salesforce | Elastic | Vercel | Terraform
Next.js | NX | Tailwind CSS
How a scalable and efficient platform sets the stage for so much more
Be•at is the Belgian market leader in public event venue management with some of the biggest and most well-known arenas and theatres in Belgium in their portfolio. They facilitate over 600 concerts, shows and performances every year for millions of fans.
The challenge
"Can we build 8 venue websites with renewable content that can survive a peak performance of over a million active visitors?"
The solution
Like most of our headless and composable web development projects, be•at was looking for a platform and infrastructure that would allow them to produce content, share it easily across different channels, and improve content efficiency.
On top of that, peak performance is a huge factor in venue management. While we always consider smart caching strategies, solid hosting options and a dependable infrastructure, it does take on a different proportion when thousands and thousands of people sign into your platform to wait for a ticketing link to go live. Therefore, a scalable infrastructure that could deal with extreme peak performance had to be one of the key components in be•at' new composable ecosystem.
How it turned out
8 performant websites for the be•at arenas and theatres with renewable content and a website for be•at Tickets
Be•at was able to go live with eight new arena and theatre websites. The marketing team can now create content for one venue, easily share it with another venue, and they even share some content across all venues. This is not all. Be•at has a flexible and scalable infrastructure allowing them to add even more platforms in the future with minimal effort. Thanks to a custom Salesforce integration, all events are also available in Contentful. The marketing team can thus extend events with additional content and make the most of each event page, offering the end customer a truly customised experience.
Throughout the infrastructure, peak performance was kept in mind as well as page performance and SEO to make sure visitors would easily find be•at' events and be able to buy tickets without any issues.
What we worked on
Extremely efficient and scalable infrastructure
By using Vercel, we made sure that the platform supports peak performance out-of-the-box. Vercel automatically scales the infrastructure to make sure peak performance is always supported. We also wanted to make sure that new additional websites could be added easily and we wanted to manage all websites in an extremely efficient way. That’s why we introduced Terraform on the project as well. Through Terraform, we are setting up the entire infrastructure through code. By doing so, we can publish one website, roll it out as 10 different websites, and manage that all through code with very minimal configuration.
Dynamic caching for live event sales
When working with live events and ticket sales, pages need different caching based on where the event is in the sales pipeline. When an event is just announced, the page doesn't change that often. The closer you are to the event, though, the more often a page will need to be updated. And when tickets open for sale, you want the page to change immediately so customers can buy right away. For be•at venues, we included a dynamic caching strategy and Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) to make sure all pages would always have their best version online.
Multi-brand component library
We made Terraform, Tailwind CSS, Vercel & Next.js click together to support a scalable, efficient, and easily manageable multi-brand set-up. The component library was set up in such a way that variables could easily change between brands, allowing for a true multi-brand component library. Through Terraform, we then made multi-brand hosting as effortless and scalable as possible.
