Industries: Telecommunications & Technology

Location: Norway & Global Market

By using Google Cloud Platform services such as Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL, Telenor Group increased 100% uptime when delivering the most impact for the best value and lowest TCO. Since 2008 mobile devices have exploded, especially in the Nordics. Telenor Group with the help of Shortcut AS, built multiple apps using the Firebase and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to provide a highly scalable backend infrastructure to meet with the growing new demands.

Background

Since 1855, Telenor Group has been a leading telecom operator in Norway with more than 160 years of telecom experience. They have operations in 11 markets and around 30 000 employees worldwide. With 149 million mobile subscribers and a large customer base on their wired broadband network. They develop and deliver mobile, fixed-line and internet services to both consumers and businesses. Telenor Group holds a prominent position in the Scandinavian Broadband and TV market, both with regard to the number of subscribers and to the extent of coverage.

Challenge

Telenor decided to develop and deliver its mobile apps called Min Familie, Min Fotball, and TIA family assistant Having approached infrastructure in different ways in the past, including developing its own on-premises environment and leasing services, Telenor Group wanted a solution that gave it “More joy, less stress”. Telenor wanted to solve everyday challenges for its family user group.

Solution

With the skills and experience of Shortcut AS engineering team, Telenor was able to streamline the development and deployment of the backend of the mobile apps. Telenor was able to manage and seamlessly integrate Firebase and Google Kubernetes Engine in GCP with IOS and Android.

GCP enabled Telenor to seamlessly create Compute Engine instances and easily configure Cloud Load Balancing to optimize performance. It was also decided to use locations or regions across the global GCP network to position its instances, giving the business the flexibility to expand into new markets. Furthermore, the business is using Cloud SDK to create snapshots for use in automated daily backups, providing protection against data loss.

The Compute Engine virtual instances are supported by Firebase for app development and Firebase Realtime Database for communication between different backend processes. Telenor is easily able to create additional GCP instances from the GCP instance template to support additional loads. The business also uses Cloud SDK to push all source code from local Git version control systems to GitHub.

As the apps mature and usage increases, Shortcut plans to deploy the GCP BigQuery serverless enterprise data warehouse to analyze mobile connectivity data and provide more relevant, feature-rich services to customers.

Results

Telenor’s new applications have been retooled to run in containers on Kubernetes and therefore can easily be run on-premises or in the cloud using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This approach allows for Telenor the ability to do local development and later push to a GCP deployment. The ability in Google Cloud Platform and GKE to automatically scale compute, memory, and storage resources helps reduce deployment and other costs by 700%. The high availability and rapid performance has positioned the business to keep expanding into new markets and to add value to the app

• Delivers nearly zero downtime since the launch of the product
• Reduces infrastructure costs by 700% by leveraging the elasticity of cloud computing
• Scales reads and writes across unlimited nodes without loss of transactional consistency
• Removes dependency on traditional, enterprise relational databases by replacing services with Cloud SQL, which supports moving to public cloud
• Achieving an increase in database performance

GCP Products

• Compute Engine
• Cloud SQL
• Firebase Realtime Database
• Cloud DNS
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud Dialogflow API
• Cloud Functions
• Cloud Pub/Sub
• App Engine
• Cloud Build
• Source Repository
• Stackdriver Logging