Virgin Media Ireland: Keeping a country connected with a scalable, faster cloud infrastructure
About Virgin Media Ireland
Virgin Media Ireland is one of the leading connected entertainment cable and broadcast businesses in Ireland, with multi award-winning services for individuals, businesses, and the public sector.
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About Prodapt
Prodapt helps clients in the connectedness space to transform their IT operations to meet their strategic objectives with enhanced insights and next-gen technologies.
Virgin Media Ireland uses Google Cloud to help expand its business and give its customers an even better service through a stable, faster, and more scalable cloud infrastructure.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces infrastructure delivery times with fully automated deployments on Google Kubernetes Engine
- Improves stability with proactive, automated network assurance and total observability of the Google Cloud environment
- Drives efficiency through organizational changes, such as infrastructure-as-code methodologies and rapid deployment
Infrastructure deployment reduced from five days to four hours
Connectivity allows us to plug in to friends, work, and entertainment, wherever we are. And it hasn't stopped growing since we came out of lockdown. Internet use has continued to rise year on year, with more than five billion internet users worldwide.
Virgin Media Ireland knows the importance of connection better than anyone. With 421,000 subscribers to its cable and broadband services and 143,000 mobile subscribers, the company is one of Ireland's leading internet service and entertainment providers. "From our perspective, either you're a Virgin Media Ireland customer, or you're a potential customer," says Robert Nolan, Director of Technical Operations, Virgin Media Ireland. "And customer experience is what we're absolutely focused on. Whether you're an individual or a business, we want to offer the best possible end to end connectivity experience."
"Our planned expansion required a significant transformation in terms of our business model and our technology stack. Google Cloud offered us the right combination of extreme scalability and reliability we needed to meet those requirements and continue to provide the best possible service to all our customers."
—Robert Nolan, Director of Technical Operations, Virgin Media IrelandOver the past few years, Virgin Media Ireland has been keen to build on that success, with an entry into the wholesale telecoms market, adding to its existing retail and B2B operations. Nolan and his colleagues saw that for its expansion to succeed, Virgin Media Ireland needed a new kind of technology infrastructure. So they turned to Google Cloud.
"Our planned expansion required a significant transformation in terms of our business model and our technology stack," explains Nolan. "Google Cloud offered us the right combination of extreme scalability and reliability we needed to meet those requirements and continue to provide the best possible service to all our customers."
Innovating for growth
Prior to its expansion, Virgin Media Ireland's infrastructure was on-premises which had been enough to run its retail and B2B operations. But the pandemic added considerably to the company's workloads with more and more people demanding bandwidth-heavy services, such as video streaming or gaming. In addition, Virgin Media Ireland's entry into the wholesale market meant that its servers would be stretched beyond their natural limits. By late 2021, moving its stack to the cloud seemed a logical step.
"We're in the telecoms market, but I think we operate more like a tech company," says Nolan. "We're always willing to take risks and experiment with new ways of doing things to gain a competitive advantage. So in lockstep with our entry into the wholesale market, we started looking at how we could redeploy our infrastructure into the cloud."
"Google Kubernetes Engine is the primary compute platform for most of our critical workloads on the cloud. It has enabled us to deploy workloads faster and more reliably through full automation. It's been very effective."
—Robert Nolan, Director of Technical Operations, Virgin Media IrelandVirgin Media Ireland worked with technology partner Prodapt to find and implement a suitable cloud solution for the next phase of the company's growth. Prodapt helped build proofs of concept to narrow down Virgin Media Ireland's choices and toward the end of the year, the company chose Google Cloud. The start of 2022 marked a three-way collaboration between Google Cloud, Prodapt, and Virgin Media Ireland that led to an efficient, effective migration within just a few months. "It's been a genuinely successful partnership with Prodapt and Google Cloud," says Nolan. "There's been transparency and strong engagement at every stage of the journey."
Rather than risk disrupting its service, the company has implemented a hybrid infrastructure. The automation engines, wholesale business platform, and network assurance platform are deployed on Google Cloud, integrating with the rest of the stack that remains on-premises. In order to achieve a harmony between the cloud and on-premises components, Virgin Media Ireland redesigned its existing applications to run on Kubernetes, the open source container technology designed by Google, enabling them to run seamlessly in any environment.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which enables users to orchestrate and automate Kubernetes clusters, forms the heart of the cloud infrastructure. "Google Kubernetes Engine is the primary compute platform for most of our critical workloads on the cloud," says Nolan. "It has enabled us to deploy workloads faster and more reliably through full automation. It's been very effective."
Anthos provides a single management platform for Kubernetes workloads in the cloud and on-premises, making integration between the two significantly easier. For its data management, the company uses Cloud SQL and incorporates open source tools Kafka and Elastic for event streaming and logging.
Scalability, stability, and security with Google Cloud
For Virgin Media Ireland, the migration to Google Cloud was not about modernization for its own sake, but about making an impact on the wider business. The company had over 30 environments across 13 app suites, and over 30 Google Cloud services all enabled for its project teams ahead of schedule.
"Google Cloud has helped to dramatically improve the pace of delivery and we can provide stable, scalable, and secure environments even as we expand," says Nolan. "I think that's a massive benefit for all of our customers."
With GKE, the company has fully automated its cloud deployments, resulting in double the frequency of deployments on Windows workloads. Deployment times have been slashed from approximately five days to under four hours. That means that onboarding new wholesale customers can be done at a fraction of the time it would take with on-premises infrastructure.
"Google Cloud has helped dramatically improve the pace of delivery and we can provide stable, scalable, and secure environments even as we expand. I think that's a massive benefit for all of our customers."
—Robert Nolan, Director of Technical Operations, Virgin Media IrelandBy deploying its network assurance capabilities with Google Cloud, Virgin Media Ireland has gained total observability across its network and can proactively and intelligently deal with issues and minimize disruption to the service. "A key enabler for our new business model is knowing that we have access to the telemetry data and a lot of intelligence around threat detection," explains Nolan. "Then we can do more intensive things like carry out effective root cause analyses and automations."
The migration has led to changes not only to the technology but also to the working culture of Virgin Media Ireland, which has adopted infrastructure as code methodologies and embraced rapid deployment capabilities.
With the migration completed and successful, Virgin Media Ireland is currently exploring other use cases for its cloud infrastructure, especially around data. "We carry a lot of data, so our Google Cloud journey is now about how we manage and interrogate that data effectively in the cloud," explains Nolan. "We jumped into cloud computing from a standing start, and the deeper we get the more opportunities we find for our technology and our business roadmaps."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Virgin Media Ireland
Virgin Media Ireland is one of the leading connected entertainment cable and broadcast businesses in Ireland, with multi award-winning services for individuals, businesses, and the public sector.
About Prodapt
Prodapt helps clients in the connectedness space to transform their IT operations to meet their strategic objectives with enhanced insights and next-gen technologies.