Telkomsel Modernizes Key Business Applications Powering Its Digital Offerings on AWS

Telkomsel continues to drive the development of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure, having launched Indonesia’s first 5G network in 2021. With investments expected to boost demand for Telkomsel’s services, the business anticipates an increase in subscribers and workloads. As of September 2022, Telkomsel had 156 million subscribers, with more than 126 million mobile data users—representing 1.3 percent year-on-year growth. Data traffic also grew by 20 percent in the same period.

To support this increase, Telkomsel sought to migrate and rearchitect key monolithic business applications to a modern cloud architecture. One of the applications that Telkomsel wanted to transform was its MyOrbit home internet service, which offers high-quality, non-buffering live video streaming, online gaming, website filtering, and usage statistics. Another application Telkomsel wanted to modernize was its chat-based virtual assistant, called Veronika, that provides services information across multiple digital channels.

The applications’ frontend services ran on Amazon Web Services (AWS) while backend services, including a content management system (CMS) and customer notification system, ran on an on-premises infrastructure. Telkomsel had to procure hardware weeks in advance if additional capacity was required to support its backend services, reducing its overall IT agility. To improve flexibility and manageability, Telkomsel migrated its application backend to AWS.

To accelerate its cloud migration journey, Telkomsel’s builders adopted AWS’ Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) approach to migration. EBA is an agile-inspired approach to development, bringing together decision-makers and developers in cross-functional teams to maximize the efficiency of the migration process. Kristian Nugroho, general manager for platform and cloud center of excellence at Telkomsel, says, “We were able to identify potential bottlenecks and solve them quickly over the three days. This accelerated our overall migration progress.”

With the transformation process mapped out in detail, Telkomsel builders began to re-platform the backend of MyOrbit to run in Kubernetes containers. To run and scale the containerized applications, the team used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), which eliminates the need for internal resources to manage Kubernetes clusters.

In addition, Telkomsel migrated the application’s frontend and backend services into a single Amazon EKS cluster for ease of administration. It also adopted Amazon ElastiCache for Redis for ease of scaling. The telco engaged a local AWS Partner to support the development work, ensuring that its AWS environments followed best practices.

While MyOrbit’s main database is currently running on premises, it is connected to the cloud-based applications using AWS Direct Connect. Kristian says, “We wanted to carry out our transformation in stages. Modernizing other application components is one of the next steps on our cloud roadmap.”

With the MyOrbit application running on AWS, Telkomsel’s IT team no longer procures hardware weeks in advance, nor oversees time-consuming provisioning and management tasks. It can launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance to provide the Amazon EKS cluster with additional compute power in less than 13 minutes.

Kristian states, “We’ve reduced the expense of upgrading hardware and managing our environment. Now, we can allocate more resources to enhancing MyOrbit application and improving services.”

Following the success of MyOrbit, Telkomsel migrated the on-premises infrastructure behind Veronika to AWS. The IT team followed a similar process to the MyOrbit migration, supporting Veronika to run in Amazon EKS. With Veronika on AWS, application performance has increased by 170 percent and CPU consumption has reduced by 62.5 percent. Kristian says, “Our virtual assistance service has demonstrated improved performance in responding to customer inquiries and has proven to be more efficient in terms of resource utilization.”