Design Ticketmaster – Frontend System Design

We’ll walk through the frontend system design for Ticketmaster: a ticket marketplace that shows a live seat map for a 20,000-seat arena, lets you hold seats before you pay, and stays fair when 100,000 people open the page at 10:00 AM. You’ll see why the map is a canvas with its own hit tester instead of 20,000 DOM nodes, how a hold is applied on the client before the server answers, why the countdown uses the server’s clock, and how a waiting room keeps the seat map off the network until a signed admit token exists.

This is not a seating chart printed on a poster. A static SVG of an empty venue is a weekend project. Ticketmaster is the version where the interviewer says “assume Madison Square Garden, an on-sale that melts the site, and two people clicking the last seat in the row”, and every shortcut from a calendar picker or a movie-seat grid stops working.

Problem Statement

Design the frontend for a ticket marketplace like Ticketmaster.

Requirements:

• A zoomable seat... premium content.