The American superhero film Avengers Endgame has been released on Friday in India. The film which is a sequel to 2012's The Avengers, 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron and 2018's Avengers: Infinity War is making waves in the international market including China where it is reported to have opened with a staggering Rs 747 crore at the Chinese box office.
In India, the leading online ticket booking platform BookMyshow.com reported that the Avengers Endgame was shattering all its previous records for the highest number of advance tickets sold for a Hollywood film. The company said it sold 2.8 million advance tickets, averaging 18 tickets sold per second and predicted that as many as 4 million tickets will be sold on the first day of the show itself.
“Early trends on BookMyShow indicate that Avengers: Endgame will break all box office records for a Hollywood film in India. The opening day business is expected to hit Rs 55 crore and will likely cross Rs 150 crore in its opening weekend,” said Ashish Saksena, COO – Cinemas, BookMyShow.
You must be thinking how did BookMyshow manage such a spike in its traffic and transactions? Especially in a market where websites and applications are doomed to be down or slow when traffic suddenly goes upward. Just think about the announcement of results of board examinations or outcome of recruitment examinations, perhaps, you will be able to connect.
But that does not happen with BookMyShow.com. The company's platform is robust, it uses agile, flexible and secure modern technology. For example, its app heavily leverages some of the data center, compute and storage management technologies from American virtual infrastructure provider VMware. The company uses three key solutions of VMware including vSAN, vCloud Suite and vCenter.
While VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged, software-defined storage (SDS) product that pools together direct-attached storage devices across a VMware vSphere cluster to create a distributed, shared data store allowing traffic to be isolated within specific portions of a storage area network so that if a problem occurs in one logical partition, it can be handled with a minimum of disruption to the rest of the network.
Over 2.8 million Avengers (/Marvel) movie fans trusted BookMyShow to book their tickets prior to the movie's release, avoiding long wait times and system delays to reserve their seat well in advance. Thanks to BookMyShow for their trust in Wavefront as a weapon to find the right doors of anomalies early, maximized uptime and fight back trouble proactively, Avengers-style.
On the other hand, VMware vCloud Suite is similar to Microsoft's Azure, Amazon's AWS, and Apple's iCloud. vCloud Suite is a brand and a part of a family of VMware products, with the most popular being the vCloud Suite and vCloud IaaS offerings.
VMware vCenter is a data center management server application developed to monitor virtualized environments. It provides centralized management and operation, resource provisioning and performance evaluation of virtual machines residing on a distributed virtual data center.
The VMware said that the combination of these technologies enabled BookMyShow to handle record-breaking advance ticket sales of 2.8 million.
BookMyShow has fully virtualized environment features more than 100 VMware vSphere-based servers and 5000 virtual machines. These run almost entirely on VMware VSAN-based hyperconverged infrastructure.
According to virtual infrastructure provider, running vSphere with VMware vRealize Operations Management provides BookMyShow with a self-learning intelligent tool that supplies predictive analytics and smart alerts on application and infrastructure health. This allows the service to quickly identify and remediate potential performance, capacity and configuration issues.
In addition, BookMyShow leverages VMware Workspace ONE, a digital workspace technology that smoothly connects its employees. Using a software-defined data center allows BookMyShow to scale up rapidly to meet demand, then scale back down to conserve precious computing resources.
“We have significantly automated and deployed applications that improve our performance. There was a time when it took us months to launch a new server, but we've brought that down to a few seconds in the recent past. Now it takes us hardly any time to scale up and add more application instances, making the process more reliable, better, and faster,” said BookMyShow's VP of Technology Viraj Patel in an earlier published interview.
Coming back to the movie, produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Marvel's Avengers: Endgame opened enormously with a record Rs 1,186 crore earnings worldwide. The film also beat Star Wars: The Force Awakens for preview record with Rs 419 crore in Thursday evening US previews this week.
As per reports, the film continues smashing records at the international box office, crushing Rs 2,130 crore in just its first two days. Now playing in 46 international markets, including India, the 22nd MCU outing is pacing ahead of Avengers: Infinity War in each of those and set a new industry single-day benchmark in the UK on Thursday with Rs 104 crore.
The film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The star-studded cast includes Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Chris Evans as Captain America, Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow, Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, Don Cheadle as War Machine, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Josh Brolin as Thanos, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Letitia Wright as Shuri, Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, Brie Larson as Captain Marvel and Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie.
