Vue’s journey to a scalable and reliable tech architecture

At a breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2024, Mike Rozwadowski, Commercial and Retail Technology Lead, Vue, and Timothy Marsh, Technical Consultant, EPAM showcased how the cinema group is improving reliability and enhancing the online booking experience for movie fans.

Vue is the largest privately owned film exhibitor in Europe, with 225 cinemas and around 2000 screens. It is the largest exhibitor by box office and admissions in the UK and Italy, with a strong presence in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

Vue’s digital footprint

Opening the session, Mike Rozwadowski, Commercial and Retail Technology Lead, Vue shared how the cinema’s websites and apps attract 300 million visits annually, with users visiting the site either to casually check what’s on at their local movie theater, or to book tickets there and then. He pointed out that the online customer experience has not always been seamless, however.

Referring to a particularly challenging event in 2017, when a well-known comedian announced on live television that his upcoming shows would be screened exclusively at Vue, Rozwadowski talked about how a combination of unprecedented booking demand and a lack of autoscaling capabilities meant the company’s monolithic solution became overwhelmed, leading to an outage that affected all customers and resulted in much frustration and disappointment.

Incidents like this highlighted the need for Vue to move to a scalable, flexible architecture.

Working with EPAM and Sitecore, Vue took an iterative approach to their transformation. As a starting point, they focused on the territory with the strongest online share and mature KPIs. Based on data, they identified what needed to be either stripped from the site or refined. Together with Sitecore, they built a scalable platform with the ability to react to evolving needs, handle future ambitions, and transform digital metrics.

Architecture and design

The new architecture supports high availability, scalability, and performance, with a headless content delivery model.

Internal and external groups tested as much as possible to validate the solution. They also used negative testing to avoid any possible issues, checking the correct error messages were displayed and the right remediation steps were presented to customers.

Benefits of a single, centralized solution

For Vue, maintaining one codebase would prove to be more straightforward and less time consuming than managing multiple versions. Bug fixes, updates, new functionality, regulations, and security standards can be easily implemented once and applied universally. With a single codebase, developers can focus on one project. Testing is also more straightforward, as only one version exists. Also, better collaboration amongst development teams improves communication and knowledge sharing. Lastly, integrating with third-party services or APIs is also far easier as there is only one version to consider for compatibility.

Timothy Marsh, Technical Consultant, EPAM explained that by transitioning to containers, Vue can deploy and scale as necessary. As Sitecore XP is a headless solution, it can constantly communicate with every cinema, ensuring the seating plan is updated in real time. This ensures customers are informed about seat availability, sold-out screenings, and ticket prices as quickly as possible.

In the first phase of testing, Vue and EPAM focused on optimization and speed of response.

In the second phase, they looked at infrastructure – by constantly tweaking the configuration, they improved performance significantly and were able to reach concurrent users five-times higher than their targets, scaling a seamless operation in a more cost-effective way than before.

Fast-forwarding to Vue’s screening of Avengers: Endgame in 2024, they knew the site was going to be busy. Having recently migrated everything to Azure, they were able to manually scale up and accommodate demand. With the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, autoscaling kicked in, with every component scaled seamlessly up and down, as, and when required. During times when traffic was low, the architecture returned to minimum levels, and Vue was not unnecessarily paying for infrastructure.

With no downtime, customers had a frictionless experience, watching trailers, browsing times, and buying tickets.

Quoting Atomic Habits author, James Clear, Rozwadowski said: “The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.”

He went on to say that Vue is committed to continuous learning – leveraging data and customer feedback to make incremental improvements. The company is currently in the process of upgrading to Sitecore 10.4 and reviewing XM Cloud and Personalize. In adherence with legislation, Vue is also planning to improve and integrate accessibility into their processes over the next year and plans to focus on data-based opportunities. They have a backlog of enhancements and new features to complete which are being split into two pillars – conversion rates and loyalty.

Learning has been at the core of Vue’s transformation, allowing them to enhance the user experience over time. Closing out the session, Rozwadowski reflected on Vue’s partnership with Sitecore.

Discover more about the benefits of flexible, scalable digital experience solutions and how to maximize value from your DXP.