Tata Play Offers a True Omnichannel Customer Experience by Modernizing with Microservices on AWS

Tata Play is a content distribution platform in India that aggregates TV and over-the-top (OTT) programming from broadcasters and OTT players. In 2016, Tata Play began a digital transformation journey to build seamless customer journeys and drive business value in a competitive, growing market. “The goal is to drive data, roll out new offers faster across all channels, and build an agile ecosystem to deliver easy self-service for the subscribers,” says a Tata Play spokesperson.

When Tata Play broadcasts major events such as the Indian Premier League, it experiences a huge surge in traffic. In the hour preceding such events, the company’s systems must process 1,000–1,500 transactions per second (TPS), with millions of subscribers attempting to log on simultaneously to renew or update their accounts.

To improve stability and agility, the company modernized three key applications—billing, customer portal, and business intelligence (BI)/analytics—by rebuilding them on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Tata Play has been working with AWS since the start of its digital transformation. For the project at hand, the company outlined several specific goals: the agility to roll out new content and packages faster, the ability to automatically scale systems and improve resilience during spikes in demand, and cost reduction by scaling resources down after peak demand periods. The business also aimed to enhance analytics by creating a single view of its customers across all digital touchpoints.

Tata Play migrated the selected applications from a monolithic, on-premises build to a microservices-based architecture on AWS. The company performed total cost of ownership calculations for a five-year term comparing expected costs of maintaining these applications on the cloud versus on premises, and it anticipates an overall cost reduction. It also conducted a detailed architecture session with AWS Professional Services, which coordinated with Tata Play’s internal teams and AWS Partner To The New—who led the modernization of Tata Play’s customer portal.

For its billing and consumer portal, Tata Play uses AWS Lambda as a serverless compute engine to spin down resources after peaks in demand and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to scale containerized applications more efficiently. With a Kubernetes, microservices-driven architecture, Tata Play’s development velocity is nearly three times faster than its data center. The company has also improved resilience by distributing its applications across multiple Availability Zones. It consistently achieves 99.999 application uptime and has zero-redundancy disaster recovery on the AWS Cloud.

Tata Play worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an AWS Partner, to modernize its big data/BI platform with Amazon EMR. It created a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and a data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. 

Tata Play’s BI capabilities are now enhanced to keep pace with fast-evolving use cases that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), such as a recommendations engine connected to the customer portal. The company has experienced improved customer segmentation with a cloud-based big data platform, and marketing has gained deeper insights into customers’ entertainment patterns and preferences. “Our entire data portfolio is built on AWS, and the tech stack we’ve created allows us to align to future innovation in areas such as ML,” explains a Tata Play spokesperson.