Redis > Case Studies > TELUS’ Optik TV Service Enhances Reliability with Active-Active Redis

TELUS’ Optik TV Service Enhances Reliability with Active-Active Redis

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

TELUS is a leading telecommunications company in Canada, offering a range of products and services including internet, voice, entertainment, and video. One of their key products is Optik TV, an Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service that serves over 1.5 million customers across Western Canada and Quebec. Optik TV offers streaming TV and integrates with third-party services like Amazon Prime and Netflix. One of its applications, Showcase, provides customers with seamless access to all of their local and streaming content, allowing them to discover new Video On Demand content, watch recordings and new episodes, follow their favorite TV shows, or even jump back into watching incomplete episodes with ease.

The Challenge

TELUS, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies, faced significant challenges with their Optik TV service, specifically with their customer-facing application, Showcase. The application, which acts as a central hub of personalized content for Optik TV customers, was initially built on Redis open source. However, TELUS experienced an outage that negatively impacted the customer experience, leaving key menu options unavailable and requiring significant time to fully restore all services. The outage put the Showcase service on standby for a full day, resulting in a hampered user experience that lasted up to 24 hours. The incident raised concerns among the leadership about the reliability of the existing system and the need for a more robust solution.

The Solution

In response to the availability issues, TELUS migrated to Redis Enterprise to support the Showcase application. Redis Enterprise offered greater availability and failover support, which was crucial for the application's performance. The migration was timely, as the development team was focusing on streamlining development and operations. Redis Enterprise was capable of seamlessly processing a high volume of data in real-time with high availability for the hundreds of millions of transactions per month that Showcase generates. Furthermore, Redis Enterprise’s Active-Active geo-distribution enabled TELUS to navigate outages with zero downtime or impact on the application. Both the Edmonton and Calgary Redis Enterprise clusters function as primary deployments and operate with a single endpoint, with traffic automatically routed only to healthy clusters.

Operational Impact

The migration to Redis Enterprise resulted in easier, more reliable operations as part of TELUS’ DevOps processes. It also significantly improved the customer experience. When a major incident occurred causing TELUS to lose connectivity to all of their servers in Calgary, Redis Enterprise’s cluster management system sent an alert before any other internal TELUS system about the disruption. Thanks to Redis Enterprise’s reliability and ability to scale with ease, TELUS now has greater confidence in the performance of the Optik TV applications. This has enabled the Technology Strategy team to deliver an extensive range of applications relying on Redis Enterprise, and the use cases continue to expand.

Quantitative Benefit

Significant improvement in resilience, reliability, and overall performance of the Showcase application.
Redis service disruption was not noticeable to Optik TV customers, ensuring uninterrupted service.
The Showcase application’s two-second load performance Service Level Agreement (SLA) was only achieved with Redis Enterprise as the caching solution.