Bracket and match-reporting platform built with CCEL, a nonprofit tournament organizer, using Terraform-provisioned AWS infrastructure, JWT-Authentication, optimistic locking for race-free score reporting, and Kafka-driven event fanout.
Tick Engine I created the backend for their bracket management and live match reporting. The stack was containerized and deployed to AWS on Terraform-provisioned infrastructure, working end to end. For scheduling reasons, this has not been published yet.
Architectural Highlights
- Terraform-Provisioned AWS Infrastructure: EC2, RDS, and ECR stood up from Terraform, including working through real provisioning failures around EBS volume sizing and AMI selection rather than clicking through the console once and moving on.
- Optimistic Locking on Match State: Bracket rows carry a
@Versioncolumn, so two opposing participants reporting a score for the same match at once fail one write cleanly instead of corrupting the bracket. Verified under real concurrency with Testcontainers rather than trusted on inspection. - Event-Driven Fanout via Kafka: Match state transitions publish to Kafka after the database commit, decoupling notification delivery and audit logging from the reporting request itself and leaving room for future consumers to subscribe without touching the write path.