Finnish movie chain Finnkino and capacity planning
Tuesday, October 10. 2017
In Finland and Sweden, all major movie theaters are owned by Bridgepoint Advisers Limited. In Finland, the client-facing business is called Finnkino.
Since they run majority of all viewings of moving pictures, they also sell the tickets for them. When a superbly popular movie opens for ticket sales, the initial flood happens online. What Finnkino is well known is their inability to do capacity planning for online services. Fine examples of incidents where their ability to process online transactions was greatly impaired:
- 2015: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
- 2016: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
- 2017: Star Wars: The Last Jedi
The sales of movie tickets happens trough their website. I'd estimate, that 100% of their sales, either eletronic or physical points-of-sale, is done via their sales software. The system they're using is MCS, or MARKUS Cinema System, which according to their website "can be deployed both on premise and on Microsoft Azure". Out of those two options, guess which mode of deployment Finnkino chose! 
Quick analysis indicates, that their site is running on their own /28 IPv4 network. Nice!
Based on eyewitness reports, their entire system is heavily targeted to serve the local points-of-sale, which were up and running, but both their online sales and vending machines were down. So, I'm speculating, that their inability to do proper capacity planning is fully intentional. They choose to throw away the excess requests, keep serving people waiting in queue for the tickets and sell the tickets to avid fans later. That way they won't have to make heavy investments to their own hardware. And they escape from this nicely by apologizing in Twitter: "We're sorry (again)." And that's it. Done!
Hint to IT-staff of Finnkino: Consider cloud and/or hybrid-cloud options.
