Virgin Media O2 is one of the largest telecom operators in the UK. Its popularity can partly be attributed to ‘Priority’, a brand loyalty platform that entitles all customers of O2 and Virgin Media broadband to exclusive rewards, special offers and prize draws from high street brands.
The most sought after perk of Priority, however, is pre-sale access to tickets for gigs and events, and the chance to get your hands on some of the hottest tickets 48 hours before they go on general sale is what keeps many of the registered users of Priority regularly engaged.
But the surges in demand during these pre-sales had also created significant challenges for Virgin Media O2’s IT team who are tasked with platform availability.
The challenges were most felt in 2022, when live entertainment bounced back with a vengeance following Covid-induced lockdowns that plagued the sector in 2020 and 2021. According to Priority data, there was a 43% increase in ticket sales in 2022 compared to the last pre-Covid year, 2019, and demand during Priority pre-sale events was unprecedented.
“We have to always ensure Priority is meeting customer needs, which keeps changing rapidly, and the pandemic especially transformed the way our users engage with Priority,” said Lakshmi Enjeti, Technical lead for Priority at Virgin Media O2. “Naturally that did create some challenges.
"The Priority app, architected in 2017, followed a cloud-agnostic paradigm with a significant reliance on open-source tools [as] back then a lot of organizations wanted to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure portability. The intricacies involved with a cloud agnostic framework were impeding us from scaling the platform effectively for busy pre-sale events" she explained.
"Delivering a platform in readiness for the events was also complex which hindered the team from doing things quickly. Cloud has evolved over the years and all sorts of solutions are now available which enable you to have portability in a cloud-native approach, and also provide better performance and scalability, so we made the shift," Enjeti told The Stack.
Adopting more managed solutions
The key to scaling much faster during surge events, Virgin Media O2 realised, is in managed solutions. The company initiated a cloud transformation phase which encompasses a series of enhancements including the adoption of managed container orchestration solutions, API gateways and caching solutions to complement its microservice architecture pattern.
These solutions render the flexibility to seamlessly tweak resources in line with evolving business requirements. As a part of our database transformation strategy, they also moved the database workloads from MongoDB Community Edition to the cloud native MongoDB Atlas platform. This was a decision driven almost entirely by a desire for greater operational efficiency. Today, Virgin Media O2 effectively runs two kinds of infrastructure, one for a normal day load and the other for a day load with a pre-sale event.
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“Migration to MongoDB Atlas was a very seamless experience,” says Enjeti. “We collaborated with MongoDB professional support through the course of the migration. We had to set up VPC peering between the Community Edition and also the Atlas cluster, and we used the ‘mongomirror’ utility to sync the data. It took about three hours to complete the migration and we didn't have any issues during or after. The benefit is, the operations team now has additional time to focus on optimizing deployments, enhancing performance and reducing time to market.”
Speed to market
Whereas previously the cloud agnostic framework meant it was slow to initiate projects thereby increasing time to market, the cloud native approach means Virgin Media O2 can now ship new features and changes to customers both faster and more reliably. For example, the company is currently looking to enhance the Priority search function due to the amount of content available.
To increase the speed at which customers can get to the content, special offers or tickets they want, Virgin Media O2 is working with MongoDB to enhance search functionality within Priority using Atlas Search. This is an embedded full-text search in MongoDB Atlas which provides a seamless, scalable experience for building relevance-based app features. Atlas Search also removes the need to run a separate search system alongside the core database.
As part of its cloud native approach, Virgin Media O2 is also evaluating serverless expressions. MongoDB’s fully managed Atlas Data API fits well in this use case because you can invoke simple CRUD operations to the database by calling the managed API layer that MongoDB provides, enabling very secure access to the database without the need to make a connection.
“A lot of exciting stuff has been happening since the merger between Virgin Media and O2 in 2021,” says Enjeti. “We went through a wave of digital transformation in 2017, when O2 brought Priority Tickets and Priority Moments together into one platform, but we are transforming in an even bigger way now and across all verticals including commercial, technology and strategy.
“As a Technical lead and transformation partner, I want to align Priority with these new enterprise standards because it will help with the commercial momentum we’re experiencing. It's amazing to work with emerging technologies. Not only are we adding new capabilities into a platform but we are making the platform more sustainable, resilient and reliable in meeting customer needs.
“I've been in the industry for 20 years and seeing the evolution that has happened within the cloud space has been phenomenal. I came from an era where you're not responsible for the infrastructure because there's another team that handles that. They took care of hardware procurement and it would take months to fulfill. Now our teams are in complete control of our own infrastructure meaning we can deliver much faster.”
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