Eventbrite has become one of the leading ticket sales platforms, facilitating events across the world from concerts to festivals to meet-ups. But beneath the exterior site, there’s a lot of data flowing through the company’s platform, and it’s not easy keeping up with the realtime data challenges that come with the company’s growth.
Vipul Sharma, director of data engineering for Eventbrite, spoke at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York on Thursday about the data challenges facing his company, which fields customers and data from across the globe. By June 2012 the company had crossed $ 1 billion in ticket sales, and Sharma said Eventbrite has hosted more than a million events so far.
Sharma,who has worked as an engineer since 2010 after leaving Digg, where he worked on data mining and machine learning, said one of the biggest data challenges Eventbrite deals with is the speed of the flow of information:
“So basically what I’m trying to tell you is that the challenge in solving realtime is two-fold. One is the data flow, or how do I transfer the data I have in realtime to my downstream applications,” he said. “And the second part is processing, or how do I process this significant amount of data in realtime. To process in realtime you really need a distributed processing system.”
Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:
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