Freeman OnlineEventPro
Freeman Company · Serverless Lead Architect · 2020-2022
The Situation
Freeman's OnlineEventPro platform was hemorrhaging infrastructure costs and couldn't reliably handle peak event loads. Fortune 500 clients were running events with tens of thousands of concurrent participants, and the platform's authorization system added 120ms of latency to every single request.
Why It Mattered
When 60,000 people join a live event simultaneously, every millisecond of latency compounds. Slow auth checks meant delayed page loads, failed real-time interactions, and frustrated attendees at high-profile corporate events. With a projected 100+ shows per year, infrastructure costs were unsustainable — and one major outage during a client's flagship event could end the relationship.
The Approach
Rearchitected the SaaS offering from the ground up via Digispire Group. Implemented NoSQL Single Table Design and event-driven, async workflows. Designed a claims-based authorization architecture using Lambda@Edge, moving access control to the CDN edge and eliminating 120ms per request. Introduced Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK, serverless observability, and detailed documentation for future team members. Trained development teams and business leaders on the benefits of serverless.
The Result
Infrastructure costs dropped by 88% per show. Performance increased from 750 concurrent calls to over 60,000+. QA reported they were unable to break the system. The error rate dropped to 0.00001125%.
The Freeman engagement required solving two problems simultaneously: radical cost reduction and radical scale increase. These goals are usually at odds — but serverless architecture made both possible.
Rearchitected the SaaS offering leveraging AWS, training development teams and business leaders on the benefits of serverless. Implemented NoSQL Single Table Design and event-driven, async workflows that contributed to massive performance gains. Introduced IaC with AWS CDK, serverless observability, and detailed documentation for future team members.
The breakthrough was moving authorization to the edge with Lambda@Edge. Instead of every request traveling to a central auth server, permission checks happened at the nearest CDN node. This single architectural decision eliminated 120ms from every request and removed the auth service as a scaling bottleneck.
For real-time event interactions, Kinesis streams processed participant actions with DynamoDB as the persistence layer, maintaining sub-second latency even at 60,000 concurrent connections. The error rate dropped to 0.00001125% — QA reported they were unable to break the system.
"Edithson and I worked together at Freeman where he was a contractor for Digispire Group. I had the opportunity to work with him for two years, on Freeman's virtual platform OnlineEventPro. Edithson was amazing to work with and has impeccable communication. He was a major contributor in our authorization design and serverless implementation as a part of the OnlineEventPro product. Edithson is a valuable contributor, team member, and he would be an asset to any team."