WRSTBND uses Redis to keep fans moving at the world's biggest live events
- 70% to 2–3%PostgreSQL utilization after moving high-volume workloads to Redis
- <100 msresponse times during peak event traffic
- 10,000 to 150,000 attendeesas WRSTBND scaled to larger events
Challenge
Large live events always have unpredictable bursts of activity. As attendees arrive, scan wristbands, enter restricted areas, make purchases, and move throughout the venue, thousands of requests hit the platform within minutes.
At Coachella alone, WRSTBND processed 60–70 access checks per second while keeping over 500 event devices synchronized with access permissions for hundreds of thousands of wristbands. Promoters also expect real-time dashboards showing activity across gates, zones, and venues.
Originally, these operational workloads relied heavily on PostgreSQL. As event sizes grew, high-volume lookups, device synchronization, and live reporting consumed capacity needed for transactional workloads. WRSTBND needed an architecture that could offload those operational demands while keeping every attendee interaction fast and reliable.
Redis was a must-have. Getting to this level of scale without it would have required an astronomical infrastructure investment.
Scaling access control without sacrificing performance
Rather than replacing PostgreSQL, WRSTBND re-architected its platform so PostgreSQL remained the system of record while Redis handled high-frequency reads.
Access-control devices retrieve permissions from Redis instead of repeatedly querying the primary database. Updates, such as upgrading a guest from General Admission to VIP, are written to PostgreSQL and synchronized through Redis, keeping hundreds of devices across an event site up to date in near real time.
Redis also powers live operational dashboards. Event teams can instantly monitor gate traffic, venue occupancy, and ingress activity without adding load to the transactional database.
When there are 200,000 people showing up at Coachella, they're coming whether we're ready or not. It's got to work. There's no opportunity for failure.
One platform. Multiple workloads.
Redis became the operational data layer for WRSTBND's event platform, supporting multiple latency-sensitive workloads at scale.
Redis Streams synchronizes access-control data across hundreds of handheld devices, eliminating repeated PostgreSQL queries while keeping permissions current. Redis also powers real-time operational dashboards, giving promoters live visibility into attendance, gate throughput, and venue activity without impacting transactional workloads.
At the box office, Redis Search accelerates attendee lookups using partial names, email addresses, and phonetic matching to reduce wait times during peak arrivals.
The platform has also expanded to support multi-region deployments with regional failover, successfully validating disaster recovery ahead of Coachella.
Redis Search helps our box-office teams find attendees within a few keystrokes, keeping lines as short as possible and improving the overall guest experience.
Offloading operational workloads from PostgreSQL
Moving high-frequency reads to Redis fundamentally changed how WRSTBND manages infrastructure during large events.
During Electric Forest, PostgreSQL utilization dropped from roughly 70% to just 2–3% after Redis was introduced, giving the platform substantially more capacity while reducing operational risk. Instead of closely monitoring database utilization throughout the weekend, the engineering team gained confidence that the platform could absorb unexpected traffic spikes without intervention.
Preparing for the next generation of global events
As WRSTBND continues to grow, the platform continues to evolve.
The company recently completed a multi-year effort to implement multi-region deployments and validate its disaster recovery strategy before Coachella. During testing, engineers completed a regional failover and resumed processing event scans within five to ten minutes.
WRSTBND is now preparing for its next milestone as the access control provider for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic & Paralympic Games. The company expects to support 47 venues and approximately 14 million tickets over the course of the Games. Many of the Redis optimizations already in production have already put the team in a strong position to prepare for that scale.
Following years of running Redis in production, WRSTBND recently expanded its deployment and renewed its partnership with Redis through a new three-year agreement.
Scaling with confidence
By combining PostgreSQL as the source of truth with Redis as its real-time operational layer, WRSTBND transformed its ability to support the world's largest live events.
The new architecture delivers fast access control, real-time operational visibility, and significantly greater infrastructure efficiency while giving the engineering team confidence to handle unpredictable demand. As WRSTBND continues expanding into larger global events, Redis provides the performance and reliability needed to scale without compromise.