Sky
Keeping viewers happy with high performance and high availability
Industry
Customer application
- Identity management
- Content management and recommendations
NoSQL solution
Use case
- User profile store
- Authentication
Product
Cloud provider
- AWS
Key features
- N1QL
- Multi-dimensional scaling
- Cross datacenter replication
- In-memory database
Sky, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster, uses Couchbase to keep compelling content available during peak demand for over 22 million subscribers. As Europe’s leading entertainment provider, Sky has to stay a step ahead of constant technology challenges like streaming content, which put ever-increasing demands on their database. Frustrated with the scalability and performance limitations of their legacy Oracle RDBMS, Sky started its digital transformation by migrating its identity platform to Couchbase, which provides full sign-up and sign-in functionality for all Sky’s online products. The move reduced sign-in response time by 50% and had huge implications for disaster recovery, dropping the recovery time from hours to minutes.
“There are many key factors that made us choose Couchbase: scalability, high availability, XDCR, flexible schema, and advanced monitoring, to name a few.”
Krishnan Venkatasubramanian
Head of IT Architecture, Sky
CHALLENGES
- Overcome limitations of legacy Oracle RDBMS to offer seamless viewing experience during massive peaks like Game of Thrones
- Quickly create and update products (e.g., Sky Go and Sky Online) to add new customers
- Distribute traffic load and implement DR
OUTCOMES
-
Unmatchable performance at scale ensures superior user experience
-
Flexible data model supports faster time to market for new products
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Ease of maintenance and scaling lowered capital and ops costs
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XDCR transfers data to multiple datacenters, reducing sign-in time by 50% and dropping recovery time from hours to minutes
