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Serverless Craic Ep78 How the BBC Built a Serverless-First Architecture at Global Scale Case Study
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How the BBC Built a Serverless-First Architecture: In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael explore one of the most compelling real-world examples of serverless at scale: the BBC’s serverless-first transformation.
We break down how the BBC News engineering team delivers global, highly-spiky traffic, meets strict public-service constraints, reduces incidents, and accelerates delivery—all with a pragmatic serverless-first mindset.
Expect insights on production readiness, architectural constraints, continuous delivery, problem prevention at scale, and how the BBC evolved a massive digital estate by keeping things intentionally simple.
⏱️ Chapter Markers
00:00 – Intro
00:03 – Welcome to the episode
00:21 – BBC case study overview
02:11 – Complexity, scale and global distribution
03:42 – User experience, design systems, and history of BBC transformation
05:03 – Serverless-first and focusing on differentiating value
05:47 – Spiky traffic, transcoding and pragmatic trade-offs
06:42 – Constraints and why serverless works for the BBC
07:59 – Team size, reducing maintenance load, and continuous delivery
08:27 – Serverless-first, not serverless-only
09:05 – BBC traffic levels and operational performance
09:47 – Problem prevention, reliability and long-term value
10:02 – Improvements in BBC Media Player and user experience
10:06 – Evolution, complexity, and Gold’s Law
11:01 – Closing thoughts and what’s coming next
11:08 – Outro & Call to action
🔧 Resources & Mentions
BBC Article – Delivering BBC Online Using Serverless https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/clynq1gyn1ro
The Serverless Edge – The Value Flywheel Effect Framework
https://theserverlessedge.com/12-key-tenets-of-the-value-flywheel-effect/
Gall's Law – Complex systems evolving from simple systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)
Adrian Cockcroft – Serverless constraints and production readiness
https://medium.com/@adrianco
AWS Serverless Best Practices
https://builder.aws.com/content/2pYmkuLReVaqZ29ew1P3Dn4iAvH/best-practices-for-serverless-technologies-in-aws
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