Tom Maule
From Sky
Tom is a Software Solution Architect and Senior Developer at NOW TV, Sky in West London. As a core member of NOW TV's platform development team since it's inception in 2012, Tom has designed and developed the back-end services to support all aspects of the experience including Content Discovery, Payments, Entitlements and Playout. Now with a focus on NOW TV Architecture, Tom's attention turns to the performance, resilience and scalability of the entire platform.
Blog: http://www.nowtv.com
Architecture, Performance and Security
NOW TV and Linear Streaming: The unpredictable scalability challenge
NOW TV’s customer base has tripled year on year, and linear event streaming has become a greater and greater percentage of their viewing. This talk will take you through the lessons we learnt following one unfortunate event in 2014 which led NOW TV to catastrophic failure, and the improvements and scalability challenges we were faced with when preparing for the same event just 1 year later.
Hear how we turned our entire failure case behaviour on its head; from always failing in favour of NOW TV, to failing in favour of the customer. Learn how we ensure that high availability of video assets on the CDN ensures continued playout irrespective of the state of our application servers. Take away some tips of how NOT to scale, as well as how we reversed our fortunes and delivered stability during the biggest events on NOW TV.
No cover-ups or side-stepping our previous faults, hear about the rough with the smooth, along with the customer sentiment that has made us a far better service today. Get an insight into NOW TV platform and architecture from CDNs, through our Java/Groovy/Scala application servers, down to our Mongo databases, and learn how we will handle our ever-increasing load.