"We've drastically increased our subscriber base to 72.6 million," says Principal Engineer Rakesh Madireddy. "We have provided the fastest download and upload speeds for 16 consecutive quarters. Demand is coming from all our Un-carrier moves, which aim to solve customer pain points.

"With our monolithic architecture, we had to add hardware for every Un-carrier move. We had large sets of services running as single blocks. During promotions, the most crucial information is customer usage, but it was in one functional block—and we had physical architecture that could only scale up, not down. There was a lot of redundancy.

"We needed to break down the monolithic single block into microservice architecture so the core business could expose specific functions. We had six months to procure the hardware and set up all the systems to enable the volume we wanted to sustain.

“The key design goal was a hybrid platform as a service, a microservices architecture. We've used TIBCO for over 15 years, since 2003. We're now running a hybrid integration platform with TIBCO.

"The best part of working with TIBCO is their engineering and support. We can exchange ideas and also leverage their work with others in the industry. Working hand-in-hand, it always helps us to deliver more cool features, and sometimes our feedback helps other companies, so it's a bi-directional exchange.

"We can now easily service customers, and during promotions get usage and leave the user info as is. To accomplish that, we needed a continuous deployment model where we can quickly push to production, test right there with blue and green deployment, and then push live.

Targeted Marketing and Un-Carrier Agility

"TIBCO containerization helps us deliver more experience-driven APIs. We have APIs for individual channels, for Twitter, Facebook, and various websites and mobile channels. We can quickly deliver these and reach the customer faster. We can also send targeted messages through SMS, email, or a phone call based on user preference and location, and get feedback from users. We can do targeted promotions using a containerized SMS, API, or email API.

"We listen to customers, and then we deliver, so we need APIs, and that's how containerization helps us, from marketing to IT operations.

Resource Independence and Speed to Market

"Before TIBCO, every block of code we developed was resource dependent. Any changes needed a particular person sitting there explaining what the code does. TIBCO enables us to remove that burden and increase speed to market. We now easily understand the goal, make the changes we need with confidence, and deploy.

High Performance, Low TCO

"Promotions are more stable and faster. For the recent iPhone launch, we sustained increased volume of almost 10-fold during pre-order. Out of the box, we quickly enabled the auto-scaling capability. Memory, CPU, and volume calculations were all taken care of automatically. Hardware procurement, which had been six weeks for every promotion, reduced significantly. We cut TCO. We used a continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline and ran all the website logins and everything through the platform.

Fast Migration, Confidence, Less Testing

"For the migration from BusinessWorks to BusinessWorks Container Edition, we don't need to modify any of the functional code blocks. We keep them intact and move them with only a few cosmetic changes. That gives us a lot of confidence, so testing time comes down from weeks to days. We deliver faster, and get to production easily. Because it's still BusinessWorks, we use the same resource pool—configuration and deployment is the same.

"Our digital vision is to be even more social with customers and use all the functions we get out-of-the-box with our integration platform."