Why Airtel Digital transitioned to microservices on cloud
As Airtel Digital evolves into a content marketplace, it is inefficient and risky to have all its services piled in monolithic structures, said Hitesh Bhatia, Head of DevOps of Airtel Digital.
The traditional way in which applications are built is not scalable, said Bhatia at AWS Summit Online India on Tuesday. Airtel Digital comprises music app Wynk, OTT app Xstream, and subscriber app Airtel Thanks.
While Wynk clocked 72.5 million monthly active users (MAU) in the March 2021 quarter, Xstream and Thanks had 37.5 million and 96.3 million MAU respectively.
Bhatia explained how all services are clubbed in a single piece in the monolithic way of building applications. So, when there is a need to change some functionalities, the whole structure has to be updated. This took time and slowed down processes, even as the digital services were transferring 1 terabyte of content (equal to the storage space of a laptop) per minute for the telecom operator.
Moving to the microservices architecture
When a company operates at that scale, it is crucial to modernise how its applications are structured. “When all components of an application are tightly coupled and not independent, it is difficult to roll out new features quickly,” Bhatia said. “In a competitive market, it becomes expensive to expand the services to more people,” he added.
The alternative to tall, single structures is a microservices architecture where each process is carried out by a different unit.
Airtel adopted this single responsibility model of Cloud. It re-architectured from a one-piece monolith to a structure, where the tasks were distributed into microservices. “Each microservice had one responsibility, and to do the job well,” Bhatia said.
The decision changed the game for Airtel Digital, which touched the milestone of 200 million MAU in March 2021. “The cost was high initially,” Bhatia said, but the benefits outweighed the costs over time.
It reduced the time for Airtel Digital to release updates for its apps, as the team could isolate faults easily and remove them. Airtel is among many large companies that are jumping on the cloud bandwagon to improve and modernise their applications.
It has around 1,600 employees working across its core and digital services. The telecom operator is incubating ventures that start small and are run by a team.
“Once we get to a certain scale, we begin to separate those teams, create more capacity in those teams, and invest more in those ventures,” Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel India and South Asia, told equity analysts in mid-May.
Edited by Kunal Talgeri