Key takeaways
- Transactional customer emails — account confirmations, payment reminders, service updates — are high-stakes communications for telecom providers like Breezeline. Delivery architecture that can’t absorb traffic spikes or recover from failures creates compounding problems. Dropped events become missed communications, and missed communications become support calls and churn.
- Decoupling event generation from email delivery using Google Cloud Pub/Sub means neither system is dependent on the other’s availability, giving Breezeline resilience across the entire notification pipeline.
- Cloud Run functions’ auto-scaling model eliminates the need to overprovision infrastructure for peak periods. The system scales with traffic, not against it.
- Real-time monitoring and alerting transform operations from reactive to proactive. Breezeline’s team detects anomalies in the pipeline before they impact customers. Dashboard tooling makes root-cause analysis fast.
The challenge: When customer trust rides on every email
For Breezeline, formerly Atlantic Broadband and today one of the eight largest cable internet operators in the United States, transactional notifications are a mission-critical part of its core customer infrastructure. When a customer signs up for service, changes their address or has an upcoming payment, they expect an email from Breezeline. Immediately.
However, customer lifecycle events — signups, address changes, payment notifications — were generated inside a third-party SaaS platform. Getting those events to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, where Breezeline’s email delivery infrastructure lived, required more than a simple hookup. Without an integration built for reliability and scale, customer communications risked arriving late — or not at all.
Billing cycles create spikes. So do service outages and promotional periods. Any integration that couldn’t absorb those peaks without dropping events, degrading or failing silently was a liability. Breezeline needed a system that would:
- Guarantee reliable event delivery
- Handle variable loads gracefully
- Give operators real-time pipeline visibility
- Recover automatically when upstream or downstream systems behave unexpectedly
For a telecom provider whose business depends on retention, any technical problem creates a customer experience problem. Every missed notification is a small erosion of the trust that keeps subscribers subscribed.
The TELUS Digital approach: Event-driven architecture built for scale and resilience
TELUS Digital designed a real-time integration between Breezeline’s systems and Salesforce Marketing Cloud using an event-driven architecture on Google Cloud. The pattern fit Breezeline’s exact challenge: a high volume of events, unpredictable traffic and no tolerance for dropped messages.
Decoupled event delivery with Google Cloud Pub/Sub
The core of Breezeline’s solution is Google Cloud Pub/Sub, a fully managed, real-time messaging service that acts as the connective tissue between the telecommunications provider’s event sources and its downstream delivery systems.
By routing all customer lifecycle events through Pub/Sub, TELUS Digital decoupled event generation from email delivery, meaning neither system’s availability is dependent on the other’s.
So, if Salesforce Marketing Cloud experiences a temporary slowdown, events queue safely in Pub/Sub rather than being dropped. If a spike in customer activity floods the upstream platform, Pub/Sub absorbs it without backpressure reaching the source system.
Serverless processing with Cloud Run functions
Cloud Run functions handle event transformation and delivery coordination (i.e., picking up messages from Pub/Sub, applying the necessary business logic, triggering the appropriate SFMC communication for each event type). The serverless model supports scalability. Cloud Run functions spin up automatically as message volume increases, and scale back down when traffic subsides, with no manual intervention and no need to overprovision infrastructure to absorb peak loads.
The implementation further includes:
- Built-in throttling to prevent downstream systems from being overwhelmed
- Back-pressure management to handle situations where SFMC processes more slowly than events are arriving
- Automatic retry logic to support recovery from transient failures, whether those occur in the cloud infrastructure, integration layer or destination platform
Full operational visibility with Cloud Monitoring alerts and Data Studio dashboards
Operational visibility was a priority for Breezeline, and TELUS Digital addressed it with two complementary tools, Google Cloud Monitoring and Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) dashboards.
Cloud Monitoring alerts give Breezeline’s engineering and operations teams real-time notification of anomalies (e.g., spike in delivery failures, an upstream system going quiet, a processing backlog that warrants investigation).
Data Studio dashboards capture the broader operational picture, enabling teams to track system health over time, diagnose root causes of exceptions and monitor delivery rates across event types and customer segments.
The result: Five-nines reliability, elastic scale and proactive observability
Breezeline’s new five-nines system delivers 99.999% uptime, the gold standard in high-availability systems, equivalent to less than 5.3 minutes of potential downtime per year. For a transactional email platform handling account confirmations, payment reminders and service updates, that reliability floor means customers get the communications they expect on time.
Beyond the baseline of 99.999% uptime, Breezeline’s new system behaves fundamentally differently under pressure. Rather than degrading or failing when event volumes spike (as simpler integrations often do), the platform scales automatically to match demand. Billing cycles, service outage notifications, promotional campaigns — the system handles them without manual scaling decisions or capacity planning exercises.
Equally important is how the monitoring infrastructure equips Breezeline’s operations team with real-time, granular visibility into the entire event pipeline. Issues that previously might have surfaced only when a customer called — or never surfaced at all, because a dropped event leaves no visible trace in a simpler system — now generate alerts so the team can act before customers are affected. When exceptions occur, the dashboard tooling shortens investigation time by providing the event-level detail needed to dramatically accelerate root-cause analysis and maintain uninterrupted service.
TELUS Digital’s team did a great job in taking our email communication to the next level. They’ve built a connection between our legacy billing and SFMC using GCP tools that allows for real-time triggering of transactional emails. On top of that, they built a complete monitoring tool that checks for consistency, errors and validation while also reporting on daily volumes.”
