A story of digital transformation
CUSTOMER PROFILE
VTR is a leading telecommunications services provider in Chile, part of the Liberty Latin America group. Today, VTR leads the television and Internet industry in the country, connecting more than 3.5 million households with high internet speeds and digital television. It is also the second-largest telecommunications company in the country. VTR reaches 1.462.700 buildings and customers in 45 cities in Chile.
THE CHALLENGE
VTR wanted to reduce the licensing costs for its e-commerce platform that hosts “www.vtr.com.” However, its licensing provider used a proprietary (lock-in) model that forced VTR to make a significant investment just to keep the application running.
Similarly, VTR wanted to transform its IT architecture for this e-commerce site, to apply agile best practices, and to build scalability, as well as allowing it to add capacity on-demand and bringing true elastic compute to its applications and their related infrastructure.
PROPOSED SOLUTION AND ARCHITECTURE
In conjunction with LLA’s (Liberty Latin America) Cloud Solutions team, the AWS team worked to design a modern, open software architecture that leveraged microservices technology to allow applications to be decoupled from the infrastructure they run on. This eliminated all scalability constraints and integrated easily into our native AWS services.
The solution incorporates Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), AWS App Mesh, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray.
Results
The proposed solution allowed VTR to adopt an innovative pay-as-you-go model for the contracted services, reducing the initial investment, and giving new freedom to innovate. It also ensured its infrastructure meet business demands both for today and into the future.
In addition, by separating the application into smaller, elastic services using containers, VTR was able to gain flexibility in decision-making, and can now even make architectural changes with Agility. This increased its throughput and properly managed source code changes, shortening the timeframe of essential processes that used to take months, to just days.
In addition, the monitoring services that are now in place helped improve the VTR operations team efficiency, by reducing the time needed to troubleshoot and assess the impact of a new proposed change. Our solution has helped them focus on optimizing the infrastructure, instead of worrying about incident management.
SUCCESS METRICS
– $600,000 in savings, when compared to the solution that was previously used for e-commerce
– 50% faster Time to Market (TTM). Allowing new features to be released in weeks, rather than months.
– Going from Reactive Monitoring to Proactive Maintenance significantly reduced application downtime and shrank the mean time we were able to respond metrics from hours down to minutes.
LESSONS LEARNED
With this new cloud solution, VTR is accelerating the pace of innovation. In the first stage alone, the new architecture enabled a more agile decision-making process, and it’s expected to further transform the way the site and team operate, to better respond to customer demands. LLA(Liberty Latin America) will continue to apply the best practices outlined in the AWS NEXT GEN MSP program, and offer value to its customers and strategic partners at all stages of their cloud adoption journey.