Liberty Latin America Builds a Global Infrastructure for Millions of Subscribers Using AWS Local Zones and AWS Outposts

Established from a corporate split-off in January 2018, LLA has a rich history of delivering communications and entertainment services to businesses and consumers globally. Its goal is to provide bundled video, internet, and telephone subscriptions across the Caribbean and Latin America. On an annual basis, the company generates around 4.5 billion dollars in revenue and serves more than 40 unique marketplaces.

Upon completing a large-scale acquisition in 2020, LLA faced the complex task of building a resilient, robust infrastructure that could support an expansion into Puerto Rico. “We had to build the systems from scratch,” says Joaquin Cameselle, senior manager of cloud services at LLA. “We don’t have any major data centers in Puerto Rico. We were looking for a solution that would deliver high performance and scalability, and which would also give us the ability to deploy our resources at the edge.”

The LLA team realized that it needed to extend connectivity from its data centers in Miami to Puerto Rico. To maintain a high-quality service for subscribers in Puerto Rico, the company wanted to find a solution that could provide connectivity to its BSS in 50 ms or less. LLA set up sandbox environments to test different edge services and decided to adopt AWS Outposts. In addition to high performance, the LLA team found that many of the company’s business applications, such as its Salesforce software, were certified for deployment on AWS. “We’ve been using AWS services for 5 years,” says Cameselle. “We know its internal systems follow best practices, and we trust the high availability that it offers.”

LLA went all in on AWS, and its teams began working to stand up an outpost in Puerto Rico using AWS Outposts. To support its roughly 1 million mobile subscribers, LLA set up a network that runs in parallel with the existing infrastructure. LLA’s teams then started migrating its subscribers’ voicemails, SIM cards, and other important data to its network. “As soon as management said go, we were working in the cloud on AWS,” says Cameselle. “This project was happening during the COVID-19 pandemic, so there were all sorts of delays with hardware and logistics. By using AWS, we saved at least 6–8 months in time to market.”

While LLA was running its BSS application in AWS Outposts as the primary environment, the team required a second environment for the same application to virtually ensure disaster recovery and resilience. With the nearest AWS Region in Virginia (US East N. Virginia), LLA needed infrastructure closer to Puerto Rico to meet its latency requirement. LLA set up a separate environment in the AWS Local Zone in Miami so that it can continuously replicate the data stored in its BSS and automatically fail over any time its latency falls below 50 ms. “Puerto Rico recently went through a major hurricane,” says Cameselle. “The island lost a lot of local systems, but we never lost connectivity to the internet. Our antennas are up, and our BSS has full capacity and reliability.”

By failing over to the AWS Local Zone in Miami from its outpost in Puerto Rico, LLA has maintained 99.999 percent availability, and its subscribers can access their digital accounts and billing information at an average latency of 20 ms. The company has also minimized its overhead by paying only for the compute that it uses. “We realized that migrating our subscribers wouldn’t have been possible if we had tried to stand up our own hardware and software onsite,” says Cameselle. “Not only have we been able to go to market, but we have reduced our capital expenditure by using AWS.”