• Telecoms

Accelerating DevOps delivery: Saving Virgin Media O2 £1m through Kubernetes microservices

£1 million

savings per year

Infrastructure and code

replicated in 6 squads

Empowering squads

to build services autonomously

The Challenge

Blocked by dependency on other departments, Virgin Media O2’s digital squads were unable to access the APIs and services they needed to deliver their capabilities. These other departments — typically run by third-party vendors — were slow, costly, and causing dragged-out lead times to onboard both new and existing services.

Looking to slash costs, accelerate time-to-value, ease frustration for its teams, and grant them more autonomy, Virgin Media O2 turned to Tecknuovo for help

Tecknuovo's Solution

To give the squads independence, accelerate delivery, and cut costs, we proposed a start-up-style model where each squad builds and manages the services they consume within their own teams.

We began by creating an MVP for the security squad: a set of microservices capable of business orchestration in a Kubernetes container through a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline. These microservices call five lightweight APIs to generate an image that other squads can infinitely reuse, enabling them to deliver new capabilities simply by adding their own business logic.

On top of this, the infrastructure provisioning and deployment are managed through infrastructure as code, freeing teams from the cumbersome task of manual infrastructure management. The code-driven setup is fully standardised for all users and squads, cutting governance red tape and making it instantly shareable and scalable across the organisation.

The Technologies We Used

To future-proof the model for the next five to ten years, we chose the most modern technologies available:

  • Env0: to provision Virgin Media O2’s Google Cloud Computing projects and create service accounts

  • SpringBoot: to create Java-based microservices with reactive Java to make simultaneous client calls

  • Docker: To package the Java application as Docker images, using configurations from a mounted Volume in Kubernetes

  • Apigee: to act as a security gateway proxy

  • GitLab CID: to develop several of our CICD pipelines that:

    • Build docker images

    • Provision and manage the Apigee and Google Kubernetes Engine

    • Deploy Docker images with Helm script configuration

    • Deploy Apigee proxies and configuration

Our Results

Our microservices solution means the security squad can now easily build the services and APIs they need within their own team. This saves time, frees them from dependence on external suppliers, and lets them experiment and innovate at will.

Following this successful roll-out, six more of Virgin Media O2’s digital squads have begun replicating the security squad’s infrastructure and code, tweaking it, and putting it to use for their own needs.

Building services in this way has seen delivery speeds skyrocket across the squads and has let our customer make monumental cost savings. Before we engaged with them, our customer was paying third parties £400,000 for impact assessment and design, plus another £500,000 for development. When our microservices model is rolled out throughout the digital squads, it will be responsible for saving our customer a staggering £1m per year.

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