High-concurrency flash sales and live entertainment ticket drops represent the most extreme test of distributed application architecture:
- Instantaneous 1,000x Traffic Spikes: A system cruising at 500 RPS suddenly receives 500,000 RPS the second ticket sales open.
- Extreme Hot-Key Contention: Millions of concurrent requests compete for a limited pool of 10,000 inventory items, creating severe lock contention and database row deadlocks.
- Strict Invariants: Overselling even a single ticket creates severe business liability, while leaving inventory unsold due to crashed user sessions destroys revenue.
This Capstone project synthesizes principles from across the curriculum—caching, rate limiting, atomic concurrency, message queues, idempotency, distributed transactions, and ledger accounting—into a cohesive, production-grade architectural specification.