HomeTown Ticketing is a leading provider of digital ticketing solutions for schools, districts, colleges, and universities across the United States. Specializing in event management for educational institutions, HomeTown enables K-12 schools, colleges, and athletic conferences to sell tickets, scan attendees, and access revenue with ease. The platform is designed to simplify event management, whether for athletics, performing arts, or school dances, making it a go-to solution for administrators looking to streamline their event operations. HomeTown is trusted by thousands of schools and state associations, making it a dominant force in the world of educational digital ticketing

As the HomeTown platform grew, the HomeTown needed to implement DevOps practices to ensure seamless deployments, improve operational efficiency, and handle increasing demand. The application backend is deployed on AWS using Amazon ECS with Fargate compute, and APIs and websites were exposed through an Application Load Balancer. Additionally, ECS Service Connect was required for internal communication between ECS services to maintain low-latency interactions without routing traffic over the internet.

The challenge was to develop a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions that would follow a trunk-based workflow to support rapid development cycles , streamline deployments, and allow seamless updates to containerized applications. Additionally, the customer wanted to ensure static code analysis and unit tests were run whenever a pull request was opened for the trunk branch, ensuring high code quality. Furthermore, the customer needed to automate post-deployment jobs for refreshing website caches and updating social media channels with the latest CMS content. Terraform was the chosen Infrastructure as Code tool to manage and deploy both the infrastructure and application changes.

HomeTown Ticketing chose Tech Holding as their partner for the project due to the company’s expertise in implementing scalable cloud solutions and DevOps practices tailored for high-demand applications. With a large number of AWS Certified Engineers, Tech Holding provided HomeTown with the technical depth and specialization required to effectively leverage AWS services. Their experience in managing containerized workloads on AWS, combined with their proficiency in setting up automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, was crucial to meeting HomeTown’s requirements.

Additionally, Tech Holding had a proven track record in working with the education and digital services sectors, offering robust infrastructure solutions that ensured reliability, scalability, and security

Tech Holding Solution

We implemented a tailored DevOps solution designed to address the HomeTown need for efficient deployments and seamless service communication within AWS ECS using Fargate. Our solution focused on automation, scalability, and low-latency performance.

• AWS ECS with Fargate for Containerization: The application backend was containerized and deployed to AWS ECS using Fargate. This allowed the customer to focus on their application development without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure. ECS Fargate automatically scaled with demand, ensuring that the digital ticketing platform could handle peak traffic during major events, such as sports games or theater performances.
• ALB and ECS Service Connect for Service Exposure and Communication: An Application Load Balancer (ALB) was configured to expose both the backend APIs and websites, ensuring secure and reliable access for external users. For internal service communication between ECS-hosted APIs and website applications, ECS Service Connect was implemented. This allowed for high-speed, low-latency communication between services without traffic routing through the internet, improving performance and reducing response times.
• CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions: GitHub Actions was integrated as the CI/CD tool to automate the deployment pipeline. We adopted a trunk-based development workflow, where changes are continuously integrated into a shared main branch. This approach reduced merge conflicts and enabled faster deployments. Static code analysis and unit tests are triggered for every pull request to the trunk branch, ensuring that code quality remains high before merging. Once the code passes the tests, it allows the Pull request to merge. With GitHub Actions, the pipeline automatically built, tested, and deployed new versions of the containerized applications to ECS Fargate.
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform: Terraform was used as the IaC tool to manage the entire infrastructure, from ECS cluster configurations to ALB settings. This ensured that the infrastructure was consistently deployed across environments and could be easily replicated or modified as needed. Terraform also handled the deployment of containerized application changes on ECS, providing seamless updates to the platform’s backend and website services.
• Automated Post-Deployment Jobs: To ensure the platform’s CMS content was up-to-date after each deployment, post-deployment jobs were configured to automatically refresh website caches and update social media channels with the latest CMS content. This ensured that users always had access to the most current information, enhancing the user experience.
• Monitoring and Logging with AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail: AWS CloudWatch was set up to monitor critical performance metrics and log events for ECS services, ALB, and Fargate containers. Real-time insights enabled proactive management of application health, providing alerts on performance issues or unusual patterns. AWS CloudTrail was implemented to log API activity across AWS services, generating comprehensive audit trails for user actions and API calls. This enhanced visibility, compliance, and security across the DevOps environment, giving HomeTown a resilient and well-monitored infrastructure.