The beauty of streaming television, like the service offered by Sling TV, is that you can watch it from any device you want, wherever you want.
Of course, from the provider side of things, that creates a particular set of challenges
“We take live TV and distribute it over the internet out to a user’s device that we do not control,” says Brad Linder, Sling TV’s Cloud Native & Big Data Evangelist. “In a lot of ways, we are working in the Wild West: The internet is what it is going to be, and if a customer’s service does not work for whatever reason, they do not care why. They just want things to work. Those are the variables of the equation that we have to try to solve. We really have to try to enable optionality and we have to do it at web scale.”
Indeed, Sling TV experienced great customer growth from the beginning of its launch by
DISH Network in 2015. After just a year, “we were going through some growing pains of some of the legacy systems and trying to find the right architecture to enable our future,” says Linder. Tasked with building a next-generation web scale platform for the “personalized customer experience,” Linder has spent the past year bringing Kubernetes to Sling TV.
Led by the belief that “the cloud native architectures and patterns really give us a lot of flexibility in meeting the needs of our customers,” Linder partnered with
Rancher Labs to build the platform around Kubernetes. “They have really helped us get our head around how to use Kubernetes,” he says. “We needed the flexibility to enable our use case versus just a simple orchestrater. Enabling our future in a way that did not give us vendor lock-in was also a key part of our strategy. I think that is part of the Rancher value proposition.”