Scaling a ticketing platform without manual prep

For Shotgun, a French ticketing platform, the moments right before a major ticket drop used to be a scramble. Traffic to their consumer site can jump by 200x within minutes when tickets for artists like Billie Eilish go live, and their previous infrastructure on Heroku required engineers to manually scale resources ahead of time to avoid crashes. The team has since moved its consumer site and dashboard to Vercel with Next.js and now relies on serverless autoscaling to absorb those spikes automatically.

"Vercel allows us to focus on innovating and building our products, rather than spending time on DevOps."

Lucas Gerard Cofounder and CTO at Shotgun

Preview deployments and edge config keep the workflow simple

A key part of Shotgun’s deployment process is the preview environment Vercel provisions for every git commit. Opening a pull request generates a matching Vercel Preview Deployment that the team uses for testing and staging before promoting to production, keeping the workflow familiar to developers.

The team also uses Edge Config to spin up new waiting rooms for ticket drops without triggering a new deployment each time. Combined with Vercel Instant Rollbacks and Vercel Functions, this setup has reduced the friction around launching new shows. "Using Vercel has made us more confident in serving larger and larger clients. Vercel has really unlocked that scalability for us," Gerard said.

Dropping old infrastructure for managed tools

Shotgun’s migration also simplified some of its backend tooling. Swapping a previous Firebase function for Vercel Cron Jobs reportedly took just five minutes. Beyond that, the developers point to the platform's usability as a major win, noting they spend far less time wrestling with configuration.

"Vercel is incredibly easy to use due to its great UX and UI. We can really tell that it’s been made by developers, for developers."

Antoine Rousseau Senior Software Engineer

Preparing for growth in new markets

Although Shotgun is based in Europe, a growing user base in the US and Brazil is on the company's radar for expansion. To support that, they use Vercel Routing Middleware to fine-tune cookie handling and Vercel Analytics' Real Experience Score to observe how site updates affect actual users in those regions, allowing for more targeted optimization.

Shotgun recently upgraded its consumer site to Next.js 13 on React 18 and reports additional performance gains from the move. With the new architecture, the company expects to deliver the same seamless buying experience to fans across Brazil, France, and beyond as it scales.