United Kingdom
The Open Championship
Scoring platform, ticketing,
application management and event support
application management and event support
The Open
at Royal Portrush
The Open Championship is the oldest golf tournament in the world, and one of the most prestigious. Among the 14 golf courses that have hosted The Open over the years, Royal Portrush was the one to host the 148th Open Championship in 2019.
Delivering a live-scoring platform
In 2018, The R&A were looking for an IT agency capable of developing the new scoring engine for The 148th Open at Royal Portrush 2019. Such an engine had to provide real-time scores in the form of JSON feeds for the TheOpen.com website, for the Open app (IOS, Android), and for some 3rd party websites.
After a thorough analysis of all the FaaS main providers, we selected Azure Functions. We wanted an independent solution, capable of managing and distributing new messages independently while keeping their order (Azure Service Bus). Azure Scale Controller has improved tremendously, nearing the AWS Lambdas scaling.
The ticketing journey
at the most prestigious golf championship
Delivering a conceivable and viable solution for the ticketing journey. Making sure that the ticketing
platform would support a large number of users, because the ticketing provider could not support more than
60 requests per minute.
By creating new servers and implementing a throttling system, the incoming requests on the
ticketing
platform were put in a queue and the load was distributed on multiple servers, in such a way
that
the users were as little affected as possible.
Support during the entire event
During the event, the official website would register more than 8 million unique visitors, accessing over 850 pages, and more than 180,000 hours of video and audio. In order to meet our client’s needs and expectations, we had to build and maintain an infrastructure capable of responding to more than one billion server requests, while ensuring the most pleasant user experience.
We worked with Sitecore, the platform that provides the required scalability and flexibility, and used Amazon Web Services to host this complex infrastructure. For content delivery, we used several machines to distribute the traffic among them based on a performance-driven strategy. With the aid of a content delivery network provided by Akamai, we managed to respond to 1 billion requests. The cache rules were attentively configured so as to reduce the traffic to the servers and to keep the dynamic content unaffected.
Royal Portrush 2019
The outcome
In order to deliver a unique user experience, the Application Management team constantly monitored the website infrastructure and the employed technologies. Everything worked according to the requested standards thanks to the management that displayed excellent expertise in organizing the team and the tasks, and in tackling unforeseen circumstances.
+8,000,000 users from more than 100 countries during the event
The most
accessed pages
accessed pages
Our 16 people team worked in 2018 and 2019 for theopen.com a total of
1692 days
www.theopen.com/leaderboard
www.theopen.com/
www.theopen.com/highlights
www.theopen.com/teetimesDigital transformation
Delivering a project with multiple partners
theopen.com was built by our preffered partner Delete Agency
Kevin Bain
The R&A, Head of Digital Development
Entrusting the technical integrity of TheOpen.com isn’t a decision taken lightly. The website sees a
significant increase in traffic during the week of The Open and this offers its own unique set of
challenges.
The R&A required an agency that could ensure the business-critical infrastructure is managed flawlessly as well as one that can offer a scalable service offer to manage our needs.
TEC is an extension of the R&A's team and work seamlessly to deliver a scalable, robust and reliable service when it's needed most.
The R&A required an agency that could ensure the business-critical infrastructure is managed flawlessly as well as one that can offer a scalable service offer to manage our needs.
TEC is an extension of the R&A's team and work seamlessly to deliver a scalable, robust and reliable service when it's needed most.