Building scalable and resilient OTT services at Sky

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ABSTRACT

Sky have tackled some of the most challenging scalability problems in the OTT space head-on. But its no secret that we’ve got it wrong in the past, disappointing our customers at the most critical of times, most recently in 2014.

This paper will take you through some of the innovative scalability and resiliency patterns implemented across Sky’s OTT estate since that time which contribute to delivering the reliable streaming services that our customers have come to expect today. From ensuring reliable delivery of VOD content, to handling spiky load profiles for Linear events, Sky ensures that the customer can always view their content, always failing in their favour if a dependent system becomes unavailable.

Discover how we learnt from our previous mistakes, to build our most resilient and scalable OTT platform and clients to date.

INTRODUCTION

Sky is Europe’s largest entertainment and communication business serving 22 million customers across 5 countries. Operating on over 80 different consumer devices, Sky’s numerous OTT propositions offer tens of thousands of episodes of entertainment content and thousands of movies on demand, and 200 linear channels to millions of customers.

With some of the most popular Linear and VOD content including the Premier League and Game of Thrones available to an increasingly larger audience, Sky served 2700 petabytes of content via our CDN (Content Delivery Network) last year to peaks of over 750k concurrent users in the UK alone.

Such enormous scale has led Sky to have to tackle some of the most challenging scalability problems in the OTT space head-on. But in 2014 we got it wrong and disappointed a large number of customers just as the latest season of Game of Thrones was premiering.

This paper will introduce some of the innovative scalability and resiliency architectural changes implemented across Sky’s OTT estate since that time which contribute to delivering the reliable streaming services that our customers have come to expect today. From ensuring reliable delivery of VOD content, to handling spiky load profiles for Linear events, Sky ensures that the customer can always view their content, always failing in their favour if a dependent system becomes unavailable.