Technical Practices for High‑Performance Ticketing Platforms: A Damai Case Study

At the 2020 Cloud Xi Conference, Alibaba senior technical expert Sai Te shared Damai's technical exploration of the ticketing industry, focusing on the digital journey of "one ticket" from production to venue entry.

Damai's core business covers concerts, theater, sports, exhibitions, and e‑sports, handling massive traffic and high concurrency. The service chain includes ticket creation, seat mapping, pricing, sales (self‑service and distribution), fulfillment, and on‑site entry, each presenting distinct technical challenges.

Analyzing the business from the perspectives of people, goods, and venues, three core platform capabilities were identified:

High‑Performance Ticketing : To handle peak loads comparable to Double‑11, Damai focuses on seat selection and inventory management. Concurrency is mitigated by converting requests into second‑level snapshot caches, allowing serial processing while preserving seat consistency. Data volume is reduced via a two‑stage compression: a custom algorithm compresses seat IDs into offsets, followed by generic compression (e.g., zip). Conflict rates during rush sales are lowered by a cache‑based pre‑lock mechanism combined with security risk control, achieving sub‑5% conflict after the first minutes.

Seat Digitalization : Seats are treated as core assets. An SVG‑based online editor converts physical layouts into digital maps, supported by an SVG Codec adhering to CSS standards. VR seat maps are linked to 2D maps for scalable production. Automated seat scoring (based on position, angle, distance, area, etc.) enables machine‑selected seat allocation and ticket‑floor planning, replacing labor‑intensive manual processes.

On‑Site Intelligence : Venue entry requires stable, high‑throughput networking. Damai replaced traditional AP‑relay setups with a LoRa‑based self‑organizing gateway network, supporting dual 4G/NB‑IoT channels for redundancy. Edge devices run a unified verification SDK, ensuring consistent business rules across cloud, edge, and device layers. In case of network or power loss, local edge and device nodes continue operation, synchronizing with the cloud once restored. Edge computing also powers real‑time analytics such as facial recognition and crowd flow monitoring.

These capabilities are encapsulated in Damai's TicketingPaaS, a cloud‑native platform consisting of infrastructure, a ticketing middle‑platform, and SaaS‑level solutions. Extensibility is provided via SPI and OpenAPI, enabling deep customization for large‑scale projects and ecosystem partnerships.

Future trends highlighted include blockchain for ticket authenticity and provenance, and 5G for immersive on‑site interactions, leveraging ubiquitous mobile devices as IoT endpoints.