Moving BBC iPlayer to a Micro Services Architecture
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In 2012 the system that fed video into iPlayer was a monolith. In the nine months between Jan 2013 and Sept 2013 we replaced it with a new system built on a microservices architecture and running in AWS.
This allowed the BBC to more than double the amount of content available in iPlayer and increase the amount of HD content by 700%.
At the same time it has allowed us to move to a continuous delivery model and our developers can now deploy a component to live in under 15 minutes and perform dozens of live deployments every week.
In 2014 we started serving simulcast content (on-line versions of our TV channels) from this new microservices architecture and during 2015 we added Radio. We now also support Podcasts, Audio and Video Clip Publishing, BBC Store and S4C.
This year we have used the system to serve over 300 hours of live content from the Rio 2016 Olympics and for one event this summer we served over 2 million concurrent users.
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Moving BBC iPlayer to a Micro Services Architecture
Stephen Godwin
Stephen Godwin is a Senior Technical Architect at the BBC where he is responsible for designing the systems that provide audio and video to BBC iPlayer and iPlayer Radio. He joined the BBC in 2011 and designed the systems that controlled the 24 live streams the BBC made available online for the London 2012 Olympics. Since then he has migrated the systems that power iPlayer to a cloud based microservice architecture.