> The BBC’s site is made up of several services (such as iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport). For them all, we need to ensure they use the latest and best technology. That’s the only way to ensure they’re the best at what they do.
"We need to use new shiny because new shiny is the best!"
They've always been like that. I had the misfortune of having to integrate with some of their stuff they'd thrown on to ruby on rails back when it was teetering on the top of hype mountain.
Realistically 99% of their back end at the time was bits of sticky tape, perl and ftp. They just changed those components out for modern versions of sticky tape, perl and ftp...
I mean at least it's honest. If you can't afford to pay well you can probably attract better-than-you-can-afford talent by giving them creative freedom and letting them resume build a bit.
Previously they mostly used a typical lamp stack in the front end. The php apps pulled data from Java backend services. They had a strict separation policy.
The different parts of the bbc where essentially different apps with a proxy in front doing path based routing.
You’d generate a RPM with your php app / Java app and that got deployed.
That had a few drawbacks mostly around process, it was a pain to get releases out as had to go through a single team who could deploy your rpm. You also had the inflexibility of a fixed sized pool of servers in a dc you manage.
When they first started using cloud that mostly remained the same but streamlined process. You provide a rpm using the current lamp/Java stack, a build process baked that in to an ami you could deploy. That made deployments more flexible in you was not constrained by the current physical hardware available and removed the dependency having a specific team do the deployment manually on a shared host.
I imagine the hosting started to get expensive with the dedicated hosts per service. Im guessing slowly the more they used aws services and trialing things they ended up where they are which sounds super complex.
I’m not familiar with where they are now other than the article but I’d bet going back to an app such as php, Java, ruby whatever on the fronted and binpacking them with kubernetes would be simpler than dealing with thousands of lambdas on a black box runtime. Most of the stuff at the bbc hits the edge proxies/cache anyway so the remotes are fairly idle.
The BBC is facing a massive cash crunch right now they need to do everything they can to save cash right now I suspect this isn't a long term strategy so much as an act of desperation.
I'm not from the UK, but from reading the warning I used to get when watching Doctor Who over a VPN on iPlayer, you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer. How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s), but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license?
>you still have to have a TV License even if you only use iPlayer.
Yes, that's correct - they changed the law a few years ago (previously it only applied to Live TV, using iPlayer was exempt from a TV License)
>How they would detect that I'm not sure (maybe the van can sniff https traffic /s)
I don't think they do anything with it yet, but when they do I'm pretty sure they'll take their log data of IPs accessing programme content from their CDN and ask the corresponding UK ISPs to identify if any of those accesses were from people at (list of addresses without a license) and issue a warning, and then request their details to bring them to court if they keep using it. I'm sure the ISPs will be willing to help them, and even as a privacy advocate I can't say I'd be bothered by this - those people are using a service they have not paid for.
It does seem like it'd be easier to simply require that you pay for your TV License through your BBC account, though, since that blocks anybody on a VPN who doesn't hold a license.
>but is there a streaming service that has the BBC's content without the license?
BBC does license their content worldwide, and there's a strange relationship with BBC America - so if you're wanting to access it legally outside the UK that's your best approach. Within the UK, Netflix certainly has a (limited, but good) number of BBC programmes licensed.
