Not All Telephony Companies In The Market Get It Right
With all the evolution and disruption in technology these days, telephony companies could have re-evaluated the design to leverage newer technologies like micro-services and containers. Instead, some of them took the easy path and just moved everything into the “cloud” aka data center(s). But just by moving the hardware and software to the data center and adding a couple of redundant data centres across the world, does not a reliable and scalable telephony solution make.
How Microservices And The AWS Platform Are Re-shaping The Idea Of Customer Experience
During televised baseball game, Major League Baseball can instantly upscale it’s computing demand to track the trajectory of a baseball and render an image of the trajectory and present it to the live audience in real-time.
Netflix can serve over one billion hours of content a month on tens of thousands of instances of its engine located around the world.
What are the technologies that enable MLB and Netflix provide these experiences to their customers?
The answer is Microservices and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
Together, these two technologies provide the ability to make communication tools that are reliable, easily updated, and massively scalable.
Reliability
When it comes to a company’s communications system, reliability is paramount. If the system isn’t reliable, customer calls are dropped, websites go down, and video conferences with prospective clients “go black”.
So what do Microservices and AWS mean for system reliability?
The highly-decoupled nature of the Microservices architecture brings a high level of resiliency to today’s complex unified communications as a service (UCaaS) systems. This decoupling of services means that, even if an existing service fails, the rest of the system still operates unaffected.
For its part, AWS’s EC2 Cloud computing platform had a 365-day availability of 99.9974% and their S3 Cloud storage platform had a 365-day availability of 99.49%.
Combine the resiliency of the Microservices architecture with AWS’s high availability and you have a one rock-solid system.
Continuous deployment
Referring back to the decoupled nature of Microservices, the architecture enables fixes and even new functionality to be deployed frequently and without the major interruption that a normal software deployment would cause.
What this means to the customer on this platform, is that the ability to install new features or upgrade existing services in days/weeks versus weeks/months.
Scalability… Both “Macro” and “Micro”
This is where the two technologies together really shine as the architecture that can take advantage of dynamic, real-time scaling needs meets the platform that can provide virtually unlimited computing power.
And because of the decoupled nature of the Microsystem architecture, functionality can be scaled at the whole system level or, if the demand is increased on just a subset of the system’s functionality, at the business-function level.
