Design Ticketmaster

End-to-end system design interview walkthrough. Event search, seat maps, booking consistency, temporary reservations, payments, high-demand queues, caching, and Elasticsearch-backed discovery.

Problem Statement & Requirements

Requirements & Scope Control

Core Model & API

Entities, Seat Maps & Interfaces

The Basics

Viewing, Search & Simple Booking

Deep Dive: Booking Consistency

No Double Booking with Transactions

Deep Dive: Reservations

Temporary Holds with Redis TTL Locks

Deep Dive: Payments

PaymentIntents, Webhooks & Idempotency

Deep Dive: Read Scale

Caching Event Pages and Seat Maps

Deep Dive: High Demand

Virtual Waiting Rooms and Real-Time Updates

Deep Dive: Search

Low-Latency Search with Elasticsearch