The document outlines a presentation by Andrew Kumar on technological changes and developments at Telus Digital, focusing on updates to digital platforms and infrastructure. Key points include the transition to Google Cloud, enhancements in continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and a shift towards product-oriented thinking to improve efficiency. The presentation emphasizes the importance of adapting to evolving customer expectations and leveraging new tools to streamline development and enhance user experiences.

1. 1
Technology &
Digital Platform
Andrew Kumar

2. 2
I’m sorry

3. 3
I’m sorry
Fun Stuff
What I’m going to talk about

4. 4
I’m sorry

5. 5
I’m sorry

6. I’m sorry
We are going to talk about changes.
Lots of changes.
6

7. I’m Sorry
The title of my presentation today is...
7

8. SHIFT HAPPENS
8

9. And the worst part of this session...
9

10. All of this… before lunch...
10

11. So I’ll go as quickly as I can!
11

12. Let’s do an exercise!
Everybody please stand up!
12

13. Let’s do an exercise!
13
Not familiar with Digital Platform, RA, Iso Starter Kit
Familiar with Digital Platform, RA, Iso Starter Kit

14. Let’s do an exercise!
14
Builds Product
Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Delivers Projects

15. Let’s do an exercise!
15
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects

16. Let’s do an exercise!
16
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects
Know how to build software in a
world with unlimited, and ever
changing customer experiences.
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects

17. SHIFT (to your seats) HAPPENS
17

18. Goals of this Session
1. Technology updates to enable rapid change
2. Fluency of DP, RA, ISK
3. Project -> Product thinking
18

19. Let’s do an exercise!
19
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Not familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects
Know how to build software in a
world with unlimited, and ever
changing customer experiences.
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Product
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Builds Products
& Delivery Projects
Familiar with Digital Platform,
RA, Iso Starter Kit
& Delivers Projects

20. Unlimited, and ever changing
20

21. Unlimited, and ever changing
Web, Mobile, Home, Chat,
Watch, TV, Fridge, Alarm, Car,
Sock...
21

22. SHIFT (of customer touchpoints)
HAPPENS
22

23. Unlimited, and ever changing
Google, Siri, Alexa, Cortana,
Bixby...
23

24. SHIFT (of smart tech) HAPPENS
24

25. Unlimited, and ever changing
Web only
- performance, security,
mobile-friendly, answer-cards
25

26. SHIFT (of web industry must-haves)
HAPPENS
26

27. Unlimited, and ever changing
- Personalization
- SEO
- Accessibility
27

28. SHIFT (of standards and best practices)
HAPPENS
28

29. Unlimited, and ever changing
- Customer Expectations
- Customer Demands
29

30. SHIFT (of quality and convenience)
HAPPENS
30

31. This is how we feel every day...
31

32. 32

33. I’m Andrew Kumar
Head of Product Development,
Digital Platform @ TELUS
Instructor of Product Management,
General Assembly Toronto
33

34. Check out my latest article
34
Learn more about Communities of Practice and Digital
Transformation at TELUS.
See my latest article: 6 powerful ways to grow communities of
practice within an enterprise.

35. I’m Andrew Kumar
35
New father.
Sleep deprived.
Often caffeinated.

36. SHIFT (of sleep, tolerance to odours,
social habits) HAPPENS
36

37. 37
Technology
Andrew Kumar

38. Technology key terms
Let’s start off with a refresher of key terms in the technology space
at TELUS Digital.
What are all of these acronyms?
● ISK = Isomorphic Starter Kit
● RA = Reference Architecture
● TDS = TELUS Design System
● CPP = Content Platform & Practice
● API = Application Programming Interface
● AST = Architecture Support Team
● And many more... #botcronym
38

39. Technology - Major Updates
1. Technical Health
2. AWS + OpenShift -> Google Cloud + App Engine
3. Circle CI / CD
4. Starter Kits Updates
39

40. Technical Health is not about infrastructure
(GCP/AWS/etc…) it's about how we build, operate,
and support the health of our digital footprint
Technical Health
Legacy Applications
Did You Know:
We spend $$$ on hosting
our legacy AWS footprint!
Security
Did You Know:
Some of our applications
still run on PHP versions
that are End of Life
(getting no security
updates)
Standard & Practices
Did You Know:
Only 50% of applications
in RA use a starter kit that
has Lighthouse included

41. SECURITY
Able to introduce more effective
security controls. Also to keep TELUS
out of the news.
Our infrastructure can elastically scale
based on customer traffic. We pay for the
resources we need, when we need them
SCALABILITY
We spend $$$ annually on
OpenShift Dedicated, and are still
growing
CAPITAL EFFICIENCY
Guiding Principles
DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE
Ensure our tools and platforms support
a simple path to production for all team
members of our squads.
PERFORMANCE & RELIABILITY
Increasing the performance & reliability
of our platform by having a
redundant platform with growth
opportunities into our own data
centres
SUPPORTABILITY
Ensuring we have partners who can
best support the needs of TELUS as
we continue the move to cloud

42. Now what?
1. Upgrade to latest starter kit
2. Use TDS, SiteBuilder, AuthProxy
3. Build new projects using latest ISK
4. Project -> Product
a. No big bang release
b. Continuous delivery of value
c. CAPEX & OPEX needed to sustain
5. Be prepared for a checkup
42

43. SHIFT (to safer and faster experiences
for our customers) HAPPENS
43

44. Infrastructure Evolution - Why GCP?
Teams already on, or investing in GCP:
• BTO
• TELUS International
• TELUS Health
• Analytics & Insights
• Data Supply Chain
Teams on AWS:
• TELUS Digital Apps
Outcome: Unified investment across all technology infrastructure.

45. Support & Integration
● Native integrations to other Google products
● Google provides improved support
● Improved documentation for developers
Scalability
● Applications scale across availability zones
● Applications will autoscale by default based on load
● Improved SLA
Logging
● Stackdriver provides a better & more stable centralized logging
platform
● Dashboards can be shared
● Stackdriver provides a better SLA than our current logging
platform
Developer Experience (Pain Point)
Debugging & Alerting Integrations
● Stackdriver provides live debugging capabilities
● Stackdriver integrates to pagerduty for alerting
● Stackdriver provides improved application monitoring
Complexity
● Operational complexity will be reduced
● Developer learning curve will reduced
● All application integrations can be accessed from 1
dashboard

46. Operational benefits. Gain the ability to retain
application logs for 30 days and can copy them for
record and reference in a scalable and cost-efficient
manner
Infrastructure Ownership. Ability to minimize
impacts and downtime when upgrading and scaling
the clusters (currently can take >18 hrs)
Foster outcome team productivity. Allow our
teams to develop features in parallel, and accept
external feature
These are only a sampling of the great benefits of migrating to GCP
Access to Google experts. They are knowledge
leaders and have a huge amount of experience about
platform building and scalability and best practice (e.g.
Michael Winser, PM for CI; Kelsey Hightower)
Benefits of Migrating to GCP
Improved technical support. Allowing for more
frequent product updates, security updates and
faster responses when technical issues arise
Improved Security. More access to our underlying
infrastructure will enable us to have more security
telemetry on our applications and infrastructure
running in the cloud

47. Infrastructure Evolution - What are we doing?
Alpha

48. Why did we pick Google App Engine?
1 Turnkey Management
No need for platform upgrades or management
2 Secure
More “managed security”. Reduced responsibility on
TELUS security teams.
3 Supportability
Google has much better SLAs and customer management
4 Redundancy & Autoscaling
High Availability and geographic availability built in
5 Disaster Recovery
Multiple availability zones available
6 Monitoring & Alerting
Better alerting and monitoring through Google supported
tooling

49. Who is running GAE in production?

50. Now what?
1. Become familiar with Google Cloud Platform
2. Become familiar with Google App Engine
3. Ask us questions
4. Use TDS, SiteBuilder, AuthProxy
5. Build new projects using latest ISK
6. Project -> Product
a. No big bang release
b. Continuous delivery of value
c. CAPEX && OPEX needed to sustain
50

51. SHIFT (to scalable, secure, and efficient
software) HAPPENS
51

52. Circle CI -> CI / CD
52
• Committing early and often is a pillar of developer productivity
○ Reduces merge conflicts
○ Reduces time to bugfix
○ Frequent CI pipeline runs means lots of historical data
■ test coverage, code quality, performance & SEO

53. Impact
● Bigger changes = bigger risk of failing tests
● Details of change details is lost/buried (ChangeLogs)
● Higher cost of coordination
● Hard/Impossible to revert!
● Higher risk in releasing changes to production
😊😊😊😊
😊😊😊😊😊😊😊 😊😊😊

54. On average over last ~5 months developers are commiting to master between 1 and 2 times per day

55. Circle CI -> CI / CD
55
• Current CI pipeline setup reduces commit frequency
○ Speed: Slow CI pipeline is a mental barrier (waiting on test & build
results)
○ Flexibility: Trunk Based Development Limits workflow flexibility
■ Facilitate contributions from other teams without a heavy toll on
merging code
■ automated validation of dependency updates via Renovate Bot
■ Hotfixes can be done in branches without requiring special pipeline
config or Feature Flag discipline
○ Debugging: Error logs from a failed test can be in multiple locations
○ Developer Experience: Coupled to Deployment Architecture

56. Circle CI -> CI / CD
56
• Dedicated, flexible CI pipeline can increase speed and confidence
○ Value can be delivered in each commit, perceived negatives are a
blocker
○ Reduced time spent configuring and debugging Jenkins + OpenShift
○ Read more in the update Reference Architecture Standards for CI / CD

57. Now what?
1. Become familiar with Circle CI
2. Migrate applications from Jenkins / Travis / other build tools
3. Ask us questions
4. Use TDS, SiteBuilder, AuthProxy
5. Build new projects using latest ISK
6. Project -> Product
a. No big bang release
b. Continuous delivery of value
c. CAPEX && OPEX needed to sustain
57

58. SHIFT (with more automation, better
collaboration, and faster speed to
market) HAPPENS
58

59. Starter Kit Updates
59
Merge UI and backend into one NodeJS + Express application serving both and
deployed as one container
• Current situation: Tightly coupled UI & backends, despite having them
deployed as separate containers
• Slim UI server, used for initial server side rendering, then idle
• Local development means running both apps
• Lots of configuration and code duplication

60. Starter Kit Updates
60
Benefits:
• Simplifies local development and debugging
• Simplifies pipeline configuration and reduces boilerplate
• Resource usage savings
• Developer Efficiency = Capital Efficiency and Speed to Market

61. Now what?
1. Migrate existing applications to latest ISK
2. Use TDS, SiteBuilder, AuthProxy
3. Build new projects using latest ISK
4. Project -> Product
a. No big bang release
b. Continuous delivery of value
c. CAPEX && OPEX needed to sustain
61

62. SHIFT (with more automation, better
collaboration, and faster speed to
market) HAPPENS
62

63. And we do it all in public to truly embrace
our customer first commitment
github.com/telusdigital/reference-architecture
telus.com/digital

64. 64
Why Digital Platform
& Roadmap
Andrew Kumar

65. 65
CONSUMER
BUSINESS
MY ACCOUNT
RUBY ON RAILS
ENGINE YARD AWS (PaaS) TELUS DIGITAL AWS
CMS (COMFY)
PHP ON CODEIGNITER
(PRIME)
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
BTO
SERVICE
CMS
(LIGER)
BTO
SERVICE
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
BTO
SERVICE
JAVA
CMS HS
(LIGER)CMS (WMD)
TELUS DIGITAL AWS TELUS DIGITAL AWS
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
COMMERCE
(DRUPAL)
BTO
SERVICE
...
CMS
(WMD)
FROGGER | HYDRA | JSP
FROGGER | TWIGGY
ANGULAR | REACT
BUSINESS CSS | HAML
FROGGER | TWIGGY | ANGULAR
RUBY ON SINATRA
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
NODEJS
CMS
(CONTENTFUL)
THORIUM | REACT
JAVA ON
SPRING BOOT
THORIUM | VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...

66. Growing Pains
66
CONSUMER
BUSINESS
MY
ACCOUNT
RUBY ON RAILS
ENGINE YARD AWS (PaaS) TELUS DIGITAL AWS
CMS (COMFY)
PHP ON
CODEIGNITER
(PRIME)
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
BTO
SERVICE
CMS
(LIGER)
BTO
SERVICE
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
BTO
SERVICE
JAVA
CMS HS
(LIGER)CMS (WMD)
TELUS DIGITAL AWS TELUS DIGITAL AWS
PHP ON CODEIGNITER (PRIME)
COMMERCE
(DRUPAL)
BTO
SERVICE
...
CMS
(WMD)
FROGGER | HYDRA |
JSP
FROGGER | TWIGGY
ANGULAR | REACT
BUSINESS CSS | HAML
FROGGER | TWIGGY | ANGULAR
RUBY ON SINATRA
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...
TELUS DIGITAL AWS
NODEJS
CMS
(CONTENTFUL)
THORIUM | REACT
JAVA ON
SPRING BOOT
THORIUM | VUE
BTO
SERVICE
...
● Team grew quickly
● Moved quickly
● Operating model evolved
without strong architectural
oversight
● What made us successful to
date did not work at scale

67. 67
● Multiple CMSs
● Multiple overlapping CSS files
● No single source of code or design truth
● Teams reinvent the wheel
● Inconsistent customer experience
● Builds and updates take longer
Many teams were building TELUS experiences without an easy way to reuse work, share
ideas, or receive and consume design / code updates.

68. Growing Pains
68
“Snowflakes”
Purpose Built
Tech Debt

69. The Opportunity
Our teams were not equipped to deliver customer value with velocity and adapt
easily to changing market needs.
We needed to simplify our path to production by embracing platform thinking.

70. The Opportunity
Our teams were not equipped to deliver customer value with velocity and adapt
easily to changing market needs.
We needed to simplify our path to production by embracing platform thinking.
The Solution
The Digital TELUS Platform is set of tools, technologies, and practices that
simplify our path to production, making it easier for teams across TELUS to
deliver value to our customers, team members, and business.

71. Digital TELUS Platform
The Digital TELUS Platform is a
set of tools, technologies, and
practices that simplify our path
to production, making it easier
for teams to deliver value to
our customers.
Delivery Delivery
API
Services
e.g. Account, Payment, Customer
Profile, Cart, Identity
Intelligence
Data & Intelligence
e.g. Data Supply Chain, AI,
Ad Tech, Mar Tech
Content Content
Design TELUS Design System

72. The Platform is far more
than just technology...
Technology
Process
Training &
Practices
Standards &
Documentation
Governance
People, Culture
& Community
Program & Product
Management
Strategy
& Comms
Delivery Delivery
API Services
Intelligence Data & Intelligence
Content Content
Design TELUS Design System
Digital TELUS Platform

73. TELUS Confidential | 73
Digital Platform
● Digital TELUS Platform powers 259 Apps (47m visits in Q2
2018)
● Consistent customer experiences with over 130 re-usable
brand aligned web blocks and elements
● Enhanced security, privacy and accessibility with capabilities to
configure and automatically block non-compliant code
● Reduced cost to ship code from a multi-day human effort to
a 12 minute script resulting in over 400 builds a day
● Increased quality and technical health with comprehensive unit
testing and > 4000 cross-browser tests per quarter
● Simplified IT integration efforts with 50 re-usable APIs serving
~21M requests per week
● Rigorous documentation practices to support effective
knowledge management
● Over 20 weekly guilds and community of practices that foster
career growth and share best practices, discuss continuous
improvement and community involvement
Delivery Delivery
API
Services
e.g. Account, Payment, Customer
Profile, Cart, Identity
Intelligence
Data & Intelligence
e.g. Data Supply Chain, AI,
Ad Tech, Mar Tech
Content Content
Design TELUS Design System

74. 1
2
3
Improved Site Stability
● Increased page performance by 40% in 2018
● Less bugs in production, achieved by high end-to-end test
coverage
● 38% reduction in downtime from 2017 to 2018
Accelerated Dev Onboarding
● 50% reduction in onboarding time for new developers and
designers onto digital platform
● Consistent tools enabled cross team collaboration
Increased Response Times
● 75% reduction of new page development (e.x.: BIB learn page)
● 61% reduction in new pricing tier introduction (Platinum tiers)
● Top ranking telco for ‘iphone xr/xs/xs max canada’ searches,
and in some cases above apple.ca
Other examples
Use Cases Outcome
BiB Learn
Black Friday
Cyber Monday
Phone + Tablet
Refer A Friend Scratch & Save
Network
Campaign
Platinum
Tiers
Digital Platform | 2018 Mobility Use Cases

75. 1
2
Improved Site Stability
● Reduced our tech-stacks from 10 to 5. Moving away from legacy
stacks simplifies development and reduces time to onboarding
new team members.
● Increased page performance by 62% - 28 to 46 points (out of 100
total). Improving our SEO ranking on Google and increasing the
amount of customers that find us organically.
● Reduced time it takes to render a page from 8s to 2s (reduction of
73.5%). Offering a significantly better customer experience
browsing our site.
Increased Speed to Market
● Reduction of effort to enable new Gift With Purchase offers on
the new platform from 16 hrs to 8 hrs (-50%).
● Reduction of effort to enable new HSIA tier on the new platform
from 27 hrs to 17 hrs (-37%). Marketing Example: Internet
300/300 speed.
● Reduction of effort to implement certain more complex offer logic
on the new platform from 40 hrs to 8 hrs (-75%), Marketing
example: Pik 3 months free offer.
Use Cases Outcome
Digital Platform | 2018 Home Solution Use Cases
New GWP: 55” TV
Apple TV and Pik TV
Mobile & Home
Q4 Campaign

76. Personalization/Optimization
● Drive personalized experiences & contextual marketing and
service messages - e.Bill adoption, App Adoption, Device
Unlock, Recontrating/Renewals
● Enabling teams and easing governance and data content
models (Contentful)
1
2
3
Improved Performance
● Increased page performance by 75% in 2018
● Better and cleaner code, due to effective and automated testing
● Optimized Billing and Usage APIs, built in partnership with BTO,
leading to higher reliability and resiliency of these journeys
Increased Speed to Market
● Daily My TELUS releases vs. 1-2/week before adopting DP
● Reusable components, close cross-teams collaboration
● Ability to break down big projects into bite-size pieces, leading
to a more efficient delivery model
Use Cases Outcome
Digital Platform | 2018 My TELUS Use Cases
Reduced average page
load time from 14.5 to
3.5s
Ability to release fixes and
iterations daily now vs. weekly
before
Adobe Target
personalized
experiences on
Login and Overview
pages
Independent
squads, now in
full control of
their content and
backlogs
Optimized and reusable Billing
and Mobility Usage APIs, built in
partnership with our BTO
friends

77. SHIFT (to platform products) HAPPENS
(to enable speed to market and re-use)
77

78. What we are working now:
78
Content Platform Design System API Tools
Site Builder Feature updates:
- Layout Grids
- Duplicate Content
- Block Catalogue
CSS in JS
Video Component
Benefit Component
Icon updates
Motion & Animation principles
AuthProxy evolution
- Heimdall / Gatekeeper
- Better developer experience

79. What we are working next:
79
Content Platform Design System API Tools
Site Builder features and
architecture updates:
- SSR (Cache)
- WYSIWYG
Design patterns and variations
Terms & Conditions Component
Whitelabel / Theming Spike
Component Analytics
Wireframe Toolkit
API Gateway Replacement
API Doc Portal
API Builder (GraphQL Aggregator)

80. New Product Additions
80
Next generation content marketing
engine built for content managers
to be a home base for articles,
news, blog posts.
Built on top of Contentful, Google
App Engine, leveraging TDS.
Blog Builder Form Builder
A customer-friendly, accessible,
safe, secure, and PIA compliant
way to capture customer data,
leads, and manage that data in
backend systems via integrations.
More details coming soon!
Visual Catalogue
A catalogue to surface reusable
components used on TELUS
properties to encourage re-use,
consolidate common customer
experience patterns, and improve
speed to market.

81. Now what?
1. Use TDS, SiteBuilder, AuthProxy (or Blog Builder / Form Builder)
2. Build new projects using latest ISK
3. Project -> Product
a. No big bang release
b. Continuous delivery of value
c. CAPEX && OPEX needed to sustain
81

82. SHIFT (to core platforms) HAPPENS (to
enable reuse and capital efficiency gains)
82

83. Goals of this Session
1. Technology updates to enable rapid change
2. Fluency of DP, RA, ISK
3. Project -> Product thinking
83

84. The Future is Friendly
84

85. Phone Internet Mobile TV
Home Security Health IoT

86. The Future is
86
Uncertain

87. The Future is
87
Complex

88. The Future is
88
Difficult

89. The Future is
89
Sophisticated

90. The Future is
90
Empowering

91. The Future is
91
Exciting

92. The Future is
92
Uncertain
Complex
Difficult
Sophisticated
Empowering
Exciting

93. SHIFT (at TELUS and for our users)
HAPPENS (and it’s our responsibility)
93

94. The Future is Friendly
94

95. Join us later this afternoon
FPO
At the TELUS Design System & Sitebuilder breakout session