The Challenge
The Telekom Magenta Speaker project aimed to migrate their text-to-speech service to the cloud to provide a more efficient and cost-efficient solution and to utilize cloud-native services to improve their solution continuously. The PoC that was originally made, showed that on-premise deployment would have been too expensive in comparison to cloud-based solutions. At the end of the customer’s cloud journey, we learned that proper skills and familiarity with the essential products were the most important things needed to make sure the responsible team is able to maintain and develop the newly created solution built using the Infrastructure As Code only.
The Solution
Cloudreach provided support to the Telekom team, who is focusing on underlying voice synthesis service for the company’s smart speaker and voice assistant functionality within Telekom’s main application for their customers, by building the baseline AWS EC2 infrastructure for license servers, CI/CD workflow to deploy microservices to the Kubernetes cluster, and a comprehensive monitoring solution based on AWS CloudWatch service working hand in hand with AWS Lambda to report application failures in either AWS Console or through the corporate central event solution that triggers e-mails, tickets or simple text messages.
We also introduced Prometheus to scrape the application logs to create specific AWS Cloudwatch metrics and alarms.
Overall the newly created cloud solution has brought huge cost efficiency, great stability of the voice service and smoothly working scalable infrastructure backing the platform that is serving approximately 360k Telekom customers.
“There was a great synergy when working together, and the enthusiasm on both sides has ensured the successful result we have achieved,” says Peter Vrbičan, Cloud Architect, Deutsche Telekom IT
The Outcome
“We planned and executed multiple learning opportunities and deep dive sessions to upskill the responsible team, and with the great support provided by our partner, we have achieved another amazing cloud-native solution bringing a contribution to Deutsche Telekom IT’s cloudification mission. This engagement has shown once again its great benefits and I’m glad we had this opportunity to deepen relationships with Cloudreach.”
– Peter Vrbičan, Cloud Architect, Deutsche Telekom IT
The Partnership
Many teams were involved in Telekom’s project and the collaboration between multiple companies was absolutely fantastic. The production environment was 95% ready two weeks before the planned go-live date and this assured customers to use the solution from day one with the application functioning amazingly and with no downtime. We provided multiple knowledge transfer sessions for the team to master the necessary know-how and to know how to interact with the solution, explaining concepts ranging from AWS cloud, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and more. The team is now autonomous, fully capable of maintaining their product and its releases on their own and they have released a new application version, first with our supervision, but further also without and on their own.
About the Customer
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with some 248 million mobile customers, 26 million fixed-network lines, and 22 million broadband lines. They provide fixed-network/broadband, mobile communications, Internet, and IPTV products and services for consumers, and information and communication technology (ICT) solutions for business and corporate customers. They are present in more than 50 countries.
Deutsche Telekom’s in-house IT service provider (DTIT) is responsible for the design, development, and operation of the group’s IT systems that support business processes. DTIT also creates user-friendly web portals with intelligent self-service functions, which form the basis for an integrated, cross-channel customer experience.
