JotCast | Q&A with giffgaff's CTO

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Q&A with giffgaff's CTO

Steve McDonald

6:02

Hi everyone, Steve here - I’m giffgaff’s Chief Operations and Technology Officer, which means I look after the teams responsible for building, running and securing giffgaff day-to-day. The teams deal with everything from infrastructure, operations and cyber security to new product development. Our product teams are particularly keen on getting direct feedback from members to learn how to build products tailored to you.

I’ll be here today to answer questions about everything that falls under that umbrella - how things work behind the scenes and how we build things. Unfortunately I can’t give individual tech support though (I give enough to family and friends!) so if you’re looking to solve an issue with your account, phone or SIM card, pop into the Help tag in the community forum (https://community.giffgaff.com/t/help-and-support) and the helpful members there will be able to point you in the right direction.

Looking forward to loads of difficult questions - while we wait for the first live one, here’s one of the questions members have asked already.

MrJeeves

6:03

What have been some of the most major technical difficulties with starting a "run by you" network? E.g. payback mishaps, unexpected issues.

Steve McDonald

6:03

Every company has to deal with technical challenges from time to time, but one story does stand out. This is from a little before my time (about 6 years ago). Our data centre provider went into administration and we were given just 2 weeks notice that they would be shutting down our servers - which means our site would disappear from the internet. A big problem for a digital business! During those 2 incredibly stressful weeks we managed to lift and shift our entire infrastructure to another data centre provider. Even though it was such a large migration we were able to complete it with minimal downtime. These 2 weeks have become part of giffgaff legend because of the fantastic way all of the technology folks collaborated and worked incredibly hard to sort it out.

Clikasarus

6:07

Thank you Steve for giving us the opportunity to ask you questions my question would be has Giffgaff got any plans on giving members more than one chance to change their username?

Steve McDonald

6:07

Thanks for the question. I’ve seen this pop up on the community from time to time and it’s a more in-depth answer than you might expect. We currently use member name as a unique identifier in a number of our systems, and once the initial setup of member name is complete that identifier propagates out to any number of services and datastores - it’s the way that all the different systems we have know who you are. The upshot of this is that it's difficult to change member name after first log in. We know a lot of people would like to be able to change it, so at some point in the future we will be changing our systems to be keyed on a more arbitrary ID that will give us much more flexibility. As this involves a lot of work it will likely take place over an extended period of time, probably as we migrate our existing platform to be service based in AWS.

endorphin

6:11

AWS as in Amazon?

Steve McDonald

6:11

Bang on.

Steve McDonald

6:11

Actually, you asked a question earlier - let me get you your answer while you're here.

Alison B

6:12

Why no Wifi calling? I love GiffGaff but since I moved house, I don't get a mobile signal at home, so need to switch provider to one that offers wifi calling - mobile to mobile. Is this in your future plans?

endorphin

6:12

Will giffgaff be implementing VoIP or VoLTE? There's an idea in Labs which has been marked as "We're looking into it" for quite a while now but nothing has happened yet.

If not, that idea should be marked as "Not for us" to set expectations.

Steve McDonald

6:12

In the background, much of the voice traffic will already being going over IP networks - so I assume what you’re asking about is Voice over Wifi. The landscape has changed since that idea was first submitted, so you’re right - I think it’s due a review.

VoLTE could well fulfill the needs of a wide spread of members. It comes as part of a group of services called IMS (which includes Visual Voicemail and Voice over Wifi), which as an MVNO we have more limited access to than other operators. We’re doing everything we can to get IMS set up for giffgaff, but there’s a lot of moving parts, so until we get it locked down, ‘Looking Into It’ is still the best description. Don’t hold me to it, but maybe 2020 could be the year.

PaulT1974

6:17

Does giffgaff currently use any cloud based systems? If not, are there any future plans to move towards a cloud based architecture?

MrJeeves

6:17

How many servers does giffgaff deploy to, both forum and main site? Also, do giffgaff use physical servers or virtualised servers, like AWS or GCP?

Steve McDonald

6:17

Great question from both of you, this is exactly what I like talking about. The answer is a little complicated as we currently run quite a varied stack and are in the process of moving to AWS. There’s no way to address this without getting into jargon land, so sorry for those of you who might need to search up a few terms here.

The new community platform runs in docker containers that are orchestrated by Kubernetes and in turn they run on virtualised EC2 instances in AWS. It's a little difficult to say exactly how many servers we deploy to as it's constantly changing. Currently we're running it on 20 pods that are spread out over about 25 different Kubernetes workers. However both the workers and the pods are autoscaled, so at any given time (within certain limits) there could be more or less running depending on demand. This allows us to scale up to meet unexpected demand, whilst also running in the most efficient way possible.

Our Kubernetes workers run on 'spot' instances which are even more cost-effective, but come with the downside that they can shut down at a moment's notice - which is why the self-healing orchestration of Kubernetes is so vital to our setup.

The main site is also difficult to quantify as parts of it run in our "legacy" stack, on about 12 VMware virtualised servers and other more recent parts of the site are running on a similar configuration to above.

New functionality is almost always created on our Kubernetes setup in AWS and over time we intend to move our legacy platform entirely to AWS however we only undertake moving existing functionality when we're confident that it won't have member impact.

endorphin

6:20

"Don’t hold me to it, but maybe 2020 could be the year." For VoWiFi but not VoLTE?

Steve McDonald

6:20

Potentially for both, but there are a lot of things that need to happen before we can say for definite.

Shah

6:24

Hi there. I am happy the way giffgaff is working.only one question always come to my mind. Why giffgaff is not introducing pre active sims as i saw many people find very hard activation process and left before join or someone who is not familier with internet

Steve McDonald

6:24

Making the activation journey easier is definitely something we are looking into, but we need to be careful on what solution we implement or how far we go with it as not to leave the door open for potential fraudsters to take advantage of. There will need to be a balance in the way we make the journey as simple as possible but still keep our members safe.
The way we are tackling that at the moment is by looking at what the friction points are, where do members get stuck when activating and how can we use the technology we have at our disposal to remove some of those steps. As an example, we are looking at a way to have 1-click activation if you are activating your SIM using your phone over our mobile network.
At the same time, with eSIMs on the horizon, we expect the technology that comes with it to remove some of the barriers that our members are facing today.

Steve McDonald

6:25

Speaking of...

Rob

6:26

Any chance we will see esim anytime soon?

Steve McDonald

6:26

We should be beta testing our first iteration of eSIM over the next couple of months. Over the course of 2020 we’ll be looking at making it as easy as possible to use.

endorphin

6:28

So the main, non-community, site is hosted on local hardware?

Steve McDonald

6:28

We don’t host anything on our own tin. Different parts of the main site are hosted in different environments as we’re mid-migration to AWS. The older parts run on virtual servers hosted in Rackspace, the more recent features are running on Kubernetes in AWS.

endorphin

6:30

Sounds like there's a lot of things coming up in 2020! Will you be taking on more staff?

Steve McDonald

6:30

Yes! Have a look at https://giffgaff.io/jobs if you're interested.

Rob

6:31

That sounds great, thanks for your answer👍🏻😉

Steve McDonald

6:31

You're welcome, thanks for asking it - great to see people asking such great questions.

Honey Palmetto

6:36

HAve you thought of bundling a VPN package ?

Steve McDonald

6:36

No we haven’t yet. It’s an interesting idea though - could you tell me a bit more about what appeals to you about a bundled VPN? I’d love to see your thoughts on this on the community Contribute forum, or you can send me a direct private message if you’d prefer - my username is @steve_ _mc.

Claire1uk

6:39

Do you think payback is sustainable for Giffgaff into the future?

Steve McDonald

6:39

From a technology perspective, absolutely. At the moment, our Community product team is working on implementing a way to make the administration of Payback much more efficient - you might have seen alex_w talking about this on the community recently. For a broader view on Payback you’d need to ask our Marketing and Finance teams, but I know that they’re keen on expanding Payback in the future to make sure people can understand what payback is all about, know of the different ways to earn it and also have an easier time when claiming it.

Luke Greenwood

6:40

Will giffgaff ever work alone side o2 priority or get there own app like o3,+++

Roxy

6:40

I’m giffgaff’s Head of Community, and I’ll jump in here to give a bit more detail because at the moment Payback is our version of member rewards. You can earn points every time you recruit a new number or help other members on the giffgaff forums. Payback can be donated to charity, redeemed as cash or used to purchase a goodybag.
We are working with the rest of the marketing team to see how we make payback more visible, easy to understand and make sure members find it easy to claim so watch this space. If you have any ideas or feedback on what else we could be looking at make sure to mention it on the forum.

6:45

Hey Steve, talking of the massive challenges involved in keeping giffgaff running at its best, what sticks in your mind as a time when it's been members that have stepped up and given you that real feeling that this is such a better way to do business than the norm?

Steve McDonald

6:45

A very recent example is when we went live with the new Community platform - we’d had loads of members involved in testing the preview site. Not only did they give us fantastic feedback that allowed the teams to deal with bugs and generally improve the platform but also it was amazing to see then turn out to support our wider member base get to grips with the new site. They were vital in helping our new platform kick-off on a positive note. We’ve even had members contribute to our codebase and help us implement bug fixes. What other organisation could boast that their users are so engaged?

endorphin

6:46

What do you see as the main tech advantage, if any, that giffgaff will have over other MVNOs or even MNOs?

Steve McDonald

6:46

Members. :)

persco

6:50

The technology for loan approval and buying phones need to be streamlined between ratesetter and giffgaff. The double application is laborious. Don’t you think this should be streamlined?

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