Operational Controls at the BBC

Operational Controls at the BBC

Aug 5, 2019

The BBC is the world's largest broadcaster, and is home to a wide range of popular services. Ensuring service availability is a key concern of the BBCs product teams, and they’ve invested in operational controls to help them achieve this. Their portfolio is comprised of thousands of services that communicate together to deliver live TV and radio, on-demand content, and a vast high-traffic website.

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Live events are when they see a large uptick in demand for their online services. The Olympics, the World Cup, Wimbledon, and live television votes increase the number of requests hitting their services, and they must scale accordingly. Ross Wilson discusses how they scale: not only from a technical point of view, but also how they scale the teams that build and operate these services in production.

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He also shares how they’re utilizing operational controls such as feature toggles, flag poles, and circuit breakers to ensure their users receive a great experience, even during times of impaired system health.

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Learn how the BBC scales to handle an ever-increasing amount of traffic, and learn how their use of concurrent stream monitoring allowed them to deliver a successful summer of live UHD streaming that included both the World Cup and Wimbledon.