Success Stories — Multiplex with Colobridge




Colobridge products and services used:
- The company was experiencing rapid growth and considered cloud to be a tool for implementing a new IT strategy. Obsolete approaches to the scaling and managing IT infrastructure did not meet the requirements set by business, nor were services digitalized enough.
- In order to continue to operate under the modalities in place, i.e. to have servers in each cinema of the cinema chain which was rapidly growing, it was necessary to purchase a lot of expensive equipment. It would entail large capital investments and regular expenditures for maintenance and amortization. It would also be necessary to find and recruit qualified system administrators to work in branches, which would inevitabely lead to increased expenditures on paying them salaries.
- Given that the cinema chain was expanding, it was necessary to introduce a centralized approach to selling tickets online, as well as tools for rapid response to spikes in demand (for example, before big premieres wewre to be released) and making such forecasts in the future.
- It was risky to locate a physical server on cinema premises as its functioning depends on the mall's engineering systems. If the server crashes or the Internet connection is interrupted, purchasing tickets online is inaccessible and customers cannot buy or return tickets purchased online or via mobile application.












- Continuing to use virtual resources to run online ticketing service;
- using additional services to improve digital security and resilience of the services provided;
- developing digital sales channels and continuing to develop a mobile app;
- obtaining guaranteed high-quality and responsive technical support that promptly addresses issues arising;
- implementing the seats availability feature in cinemas and making sure one ticket will only be purchased once, not fearing that something might go wrong;
- Optimizing IT infrastructure maintenance costs given the rapid growth of the cinema chain.
Implementation
- Специалисты Colobridge оказали экспертную помощь и обеспечили отказоустойчивость на уровне приложения БД — был построен отказоустойчивый кластер на двух dedicated-серверах.
- Virtual machines migrated during the night hours - between the time when the last movies were over and when the cinema opened in the morning. Every day, from around 2:00 am to 9:00 am, two technicians migrated two or three virtual machines or one major service.
- The scope of virtual resources was estimated based on the load chart created as per Multiplex services.
- In addition to the cloud itself, Multiplex started using other products to improve fault tolerance, stability and flexibility - Colocation, Dedicated Server, FWaaS (Firewall as a Service), Gateway on colocation.
Migrating online ticketing system to Colobridge technology platform created favorable conditions for further digitalization of services, as well as expanding this system to new cinemas that were opening across the country. Today, the cinema network is scaling quickly and efficiently with no need to invest in redundant hardware resources "just in case".
Centralized management of IT infrastructure at Colobridge capacities provides important metrics and forecasts for "high seasons." Multiplex started responding effectively not only to seasonal trends, but also to blockbuster releases because of which the box office workload was manyfold increased. For example, in 2021, the server load increased sixfold after pre-sale tickets for the movies "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Dune" became available. As many as 3,500 users were loading the site's page at a time, and the app servers were handling up to 11.5 million requests each day.
- the ticketing service is 99.95% available
- Up to 3500 simultaneous visitors on the website
- Up to 11.5 million requests per day
- +60% online sales since 2018
- > 2 million downloads on Google Play/AppStore.







The company no longer owns IT infrastructure in the traditional sense, but we get a clear and transparent service with the quality of service fixed in the SLA instead. In addition to data availability guarantees, Colobridge provided us with a set of complementary products that help us enhance our viewers' digital experience. We have achieved the desired fault tolerance by rebuilding database architecture, and we have no doubt whatsoever that technical support will respond to our requests in a speedy manner.





We had a chance to evaluate how Colobridge experts work in the time of upheavals, when there were active hostilities on the territory of Ukraine. We were able to contact the engineer on duty on a day off - he responded and started solving the problem in just 15 minutes, which meets pre-war indicators and is much less than the guaranteed response time from the SLA (as agreed, we could absolutely legally wait for a response much longer).
The issue then was that our customers could not complete their online purchase because there was an error at the payment stage. The product code had not been changed in the couple of days before, so the most probable cause was a problem with the infrastructure or OS of the virtual machine. Then we decided to restore the virtual machine to a working version and that's why we approached Colobridge. We received the event log of the virtual machine and found out that the problem occurred after OS updates were installed - it was at this stage that the ticketing service was unavailable. As we anticipated, rolling back the virtual machine helped fix the situation and online sales worked again.