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The Challenge
Drew Engelson is Chief Architect and Senior Director of Platform Development for PBS Interactive, the department responsible for PBS’ Internet and mobile presence. Initially, Engelson and his team employed a content delivery network that did not fully meet their needs for delivering streamed media files. This led to the periodic failure of streamed videos to start playing, as well as the chance that some video streams would freeze and not restart.
Because there was no method of measuring performance degradation through PBS’ existing content delivery network, Engelson and his team had difficulty identifying the source of these video streaming issues. To improve the system and prevent these types of issues, PBS Interactive implemented a monitoring tool that could also be used to test other content delivery networks, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). Already familiar with AWS, the PBS Interactive team was already using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Why Amazon Web Services After monitoring multiple CDNs for a few weeks, PBS Interactive found that CloudFront had a significantly lower error rate than the incumbent CDN. As a result, they migrated the majority of PBS videos to Amazon S3 storage and delivered them via Amazon CloudFront. PBS Interactive completed the migration of its content into Amazon S3 within a matter of weeks and subsequently began delivering that content via Amazon CloudFront. Since the migration, PBS Interactive says it has experienced fifty percent fewer errors in its video streaming performance. The department also conducts testing more quickly with the help of Amazon CloudFront’s invalidation request feature and by analyzing CloudFront logfiles. This feature improves PBS Interactive’s testing by rapidly removing bad files and quickly refreshing its cache. Engelson believes that “Amazon CloudFront fits well with the other AWS services used by PBS. The team members have enjoyed their conversations with the AWS team as they have migrated to Amazon CloudFront, and they were pleased when the Amazon CloudFront invalidation feature was released shortly after they needed that feature.”
The Benefits Today, PBS Interactive is delivering nearly all of its streaming video through Amazon CloudFront. This equates to more than one petabyte of video content delivered every month. In addition, PBS Interactive uses multiple third-party providers to transcode and segment mobile video assets, which are then delivered through Amazon CloudFront to PBS’ mobile apps for the Apple iPhone and iPad. Engelson says, “As with all the AWS services we leverage, using Amazon CloudFront is so simple and reliable that the team doesn’t have to think about it. It all just works, freeing us to focus on building cool applications.” He concludes, “We are extremely pleased with the performance and ease of use that CloudFront offers for streaming videos to different devices. With fewer errors, CloudFront delivers a great experience to our viewers, and that’s very important for the success of our business.”
Why Amazon Web Services After monitoring multiple CDNs for a few weeks, PBS Interactive found that CloudFront had a significantly lower error rate than the incumbent CDN. As a result, they migrated the majority of PBS videos to Amazon S3 storage and delivered them via Amazon CloudFront. PBS Interactive completed the migration of its content into Amazon S3 within a matter of weeks and subsequently began delivering that content via Amazon CloudFront. Since the migration, PBS Interactive says it has experienced fifty percent fewer errors in its video streaming performance. The department also conducts testing more quickly with the help of Amazon CloudFront’s invalidation request feature and by analyzing CloudFront logfiles. This feature improves PBS Interactive’s testing by rapidly removing bad files and quickly refreshing its cache. Engelson believes that “Amazon CloudFront fits well with the other AWS services used by PBS. The team members have enjoyed their conversations with the AWS team as they have migrated to Amazon CloudFront, and they were pleased when the Amazon CloudFront invalidation feature was released shortly after they needed that feature.”
The Benefits Today, PBS Interactive is delivering nearly all of its streaming video through Amazon CloudFront. This equates to more than one petabyte of video content delivered every month. In addition, PBS Interactive uses multiple third-party providers to transcode and segment mobile video assets, which are then delivered through Amazon CloudFront to PBS’ mobile apps for the Apple iPhone and iPad. Engelson says, “As with all the AWS services we leverage, using Amazon CloudFront is so simple and reliable that the team doesn’t have to think about it. It all just works, freeing us to focus on building cool applications.” He concludes, “We are extremely pleased with the performance and ease of use that CloudFront offers for streaming videos to different devices. With fewer errors, CloudFront delivers a great experience to our viewers, and that’s very important for the success of our business.”
The Challenge
With the acquisition of hardware and platform partner, AlertMe, in 2015, Centrica Connected Home was faced with the prospect of a significant shift in focus. Previously the relationship had been one of vendor-customer with AlertMe also pursuing it's own goals for expansion and licensing of its software. After the acquisition, Centrica Connected Home moved to quickly integrate the technical talent from the two companies and then to realign the development efforts of the teams. The new common goals of product evolution, feature enhancement and international launch, presented a number of challenges in the form of a rapid scaling requirement for their live platform, whilst maintaining stability and availability. Added to these demands on the company were an expansion into new markets, and brand new product launches, including smart boiler service and a growing ecosystem of new Hive smart home devices. They even found the time to develop deeply functional Alexa skills for their products and hence be a Smart Home Launch Partner for the Amazon Echo in the UK in 2016.
Why Amazon Web Services The entire end-to-end infrastructure on which the Hive Platform is based—including marketing and support websites, data collection services, and the real-time store for user and analytics data—runs on AWS technologies. The core technologies used to power Hive are Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The new challenges meant they had to seek solutions in additional specialised, managed AWS services. Working with the AWS IoT Service Team under the EMEA IOT Lead for Amazon Web Services, Claudiu Pasa, they began a proof of concept project for migration from their existing device management platform to a specialised AWS IoT based service for new and existing devices. This deeper AWS integration enabled the replacement of other platform components with a leaner, faster Lambda based microservices infrastructure, with Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS still playing a large part in their infrastructure for longer lived components such as data stores and platform UIs. Additional use of integrated AWS services such as Amazon S3 data storage and web hosting, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito and Amazon Cloudfront offer attractive benefits, when used in concert with more traditional infrastructure, such as lower latency to the customer, less scalability limitations and more resilience, allowing their engineering team to focus on systems that add value to the business such as advanced monitoring using AWS partner Wavefront, aggregated logging and application analysis using Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and cost analysis and attribution using resource tags and consolidated billing in Amazon Organisations.
The Benefits Centrica Connected Home is a great example of lean enterprise in action. Although it’s part of one of the UK’s biggest corporations, it operates in an agile way, learning quickly while delivering a cutting-edge product to hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers. “Our teams are empowered to make their own decisions and mistakes, and can pick up the tools and run with them, trying new things and innovating. AWS helps us to achieve this lean, agile infrastructure because it we can work flexibly and without constraint but within a consistent environment.”, says Adrian Heesom, COO Centrica Connected Home. Heesom continues, “Our ability to develop new features is much easier in our AWS environment. Plus, the AWS cloud delivers a consistently available hosting platform for our services. The ease of deploying resources in multiple physical AWS locations gives us confidence in the reliability of our environment.” Christopher Livermore, Centrica Connected Homes Head of Site Reliability Engineering says, "Leveraging managed, optimised services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, AWS IoT, API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cloudfront, Amazon RDS and Amazon Cognito allows our developers and engineers to focus on product delivery and its value to our customers. It abstracts away some of the common problems of operating system configuration and architecture design. It also makes it easier to maintain a good, common framework for product development across all our teams, internationally." Cost is a two-fold benefit for Centrica Connected Home. It can access a range of environments to experiment cost-effectively, while paying only for IT resources as they’re consumed. It’s a model that the team have adopted for its own products and related services.“More and more of our customers want to “pay as they go” for our Centrica Connected Home products and services,”Heesom says.“This not only aligns with the way we pay for AWS and make our finance model easier, but it enables us to focus even more resources on innovating our services further.”
With the acquisition of hardware and platform partner, AlertMe, in 2015, Centrica Connected Home was faced with the prospect of a significant shift in focus. Previously the relationship had been one of vendor-customer with AlertMe also pursuing it's own goals for expansion and licensing of its software. After the acquisition, Centrica Connected Home moved to quickly integrate the technical talent from the two companies and then to realign the development efforts of the teams. The new common goals of product evolution, feature enhancement and international launch, presented a number of challenges in the form of a rapid scaling requirement for their live platform, whilst maintaining stability and availability. Added to these demands on the company were an expansion into new markets, and brand new product launches, including smart boiler service and a growing ecosystem of new Hive smart home devices. They even found the time to develop deeply functional Alexa skills for their products and hence be a Smart Home Launch Partner for the Amazon Echo in the UK in 2016.
Why Amazon Web Services The entire end-to-end infrastructure on which the Hive Platform is based—including marketing and support websites, data collection services, and the real-time store for user and analytics data—runs on AWS technologies. The core technologies used to power Hive are Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The new challenges meant they had to seek solutions in additional specialised, managed AWS services. Working with the AWS IoT Service Team under the EMEA IOT Lead for Amazon Web Services, Claudiu Pasa, they began a proof of concept project for migration from their existing device management platform to a specialised AWS IoT based service for new and existing devices. This deeper AWS integration enabled the replacement of other platform components with a leaner, faster Lambda based microservices infrastructure, with Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS still playing a large part in their infrastructure for longer lived components such as data stores and platform UIs. Additional use of integrated AWS services such as Amazon S3 data storage and web hosting, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito and Amazon Cloudfront offer attractive benefits, when used in concert with more traditional infrastructure, such as lower latency to the customer, less scalability limitations and more resilience, allowing their engineering team to focus on systems that add value to the business such as advanced monitoring using AWS partner Wavefront, aggregated logging and application analysis using Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and cost analysis and attribution using resource tags and consolidated billing in Amazon Organisations.
The Benefits Centrica Connected Home is a great example of lean enterprise in action. Although it’s part of one of the UK’s biggest corporations, it operates in an agile way, learning quickly while delivering a cutting-edge product to hundreds of thousands of satisfied customers. “Our teams are empowered to make their own decisions and mistakes, and can pick up the tools and run with them, trying new things and innovating. AWS helps us to achieve this lean, agile infrastructure because it we can work flexibly and without constraint but within a consistent environment.”, says Adrian Heesom, COO Centrica Connected Home. Heesom continues, “Our ability to develop new features is much easier in our AWS environment. Plus, the AWS cloud delivers a consistently available hosting platform for our services. The ease of deploying resources in multiple physical AWS locations gives us confidence in the reliability of our environment.” Christopher Livermore, Centrica Connected Homes Head of Site Reliability Engineering says, "Leveraging managed, optimised services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, AWS IoT, API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cloudfront, Amazon RDS and Amazon Cognito allows our developers and engineers to focus on product delivery and its value to our customers. It abstracts away some of the common problems of operating system configuration and architecture design. It also makes it easier to maintain a good, common framework for product development across all our teams, internationally." Cost is a two-fold benefit for Centrica Connected Home. It can access a range of environments to experiment cost-effectively, while paying only for IT resources as they’re consumed. It’s a model that the team have adopted for its own products and related services.“More and more of our customers want to “pay as they go” for our Centrica Connected Home products and services,”Heesom says.“This not only aligns with the way we pay for AWS and make our finance model easier, but it enables us to focus even more resources on innovating our services further.”
The Challenge
After maintaining on-premises hardware and custom publishing software for nearly two decades, The Seattle Times sought to migrate its website publishing to a contemporary content management platform. To avoid the costs of acquiring and configuring new hardware infrastructure and the required staff to maintain it, the company initially chose a fully managed hosting vendor. But after several months, The Times' software engineering team found it had sacrificed flexibility and agility in exchange for less maintenance responsibility. As the hosted platform struggled with managing traffic under a vastly fluctuating load, The Seattle Times team was hamstrung in its ability to scale up to meet customer demand. Tom Bain, the software engineering manager overseeing the migration effort, says, "We had a fairly standard architecture in mind when we set out to do the migration, and we encouraged our vendor to adapt to our needs, but they struggled with the idea of altering their own business model to satisfy our very unique hosting needs."
Why Amazon Web Services To address these core scalability concerns, The Seattle Times engineering team considered several alternative hosting options, including self-hosting on premises, more flexible managed hosting options, and various cloud providers. The team concluded that the available cloud options provided the needed flexibility, appropriate architecture, and desired cost savings. The company ultimately chose Amazon Web Services (AWS), in part because of the maturity of the product offering and, most significantly, the auto-scaling capabilities built into the service. The Seattle Times' new software is built on the LAMP stack, and the added benefits of native, Linux-based cloud hosting made the most sense when choosing a new vendor. The Seattle Times developed a proof-of-concept and implementation plan, which was reviewed by a team from AWS Support. “They looked over our architecture and said, ‘Here are some things that we recommend you do, some best practices, and some lessons learned,’ ” says Rob Grutko, director of technology for The Seattle Times. “They were very helpful in making sure we were production ready.” After implementing the desired system architecture and vetting the chosen components and configuration with AWS, The Times deployed its new system in just six hours. The website moved to the AWS platform between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. and final testing was completed by 5 a.m. — in time for the next news day.
How Seattle Times Uses AWS Seattletimes.com is now hosted in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for resizable compute capacity and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for persistent block-level storage volumes. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) serves as a scalable cloud-based database, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a fully redundant infrastructure for storing and retrieving data, and Amazon Route 53 offers a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. The Times is using Amazon CloudFront in front of several Amazon S3 buckets to distribute a huge collection of photo imagery. The combination of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 is used to embed photos into news stories distributed to The Times readers with low latency and high transfer speeds. Additionally, Amazon ElastiCache serves as an in-memory “cache in the cloud” in The Times’ new configuration. The Times is also using AWS Lambda to resize images for viewing on different devices such as desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
The Benefits With AWS, The Seattle Times can now automatically scale up very rapidly to accommodate spikes in website traffic when big stories break, and scale down during slower traffic periods to reduce costs. “Auto-scaling is really the clincher to this,” Grutko says. “With AWS, we can now serve our online readers with speed and efficiency, scaling to meet demand and delivering a better reader experience.’’ Moreover, news images can now be rapidly resized for different viewing environments, allowing breaking-news stories to reach readers faster. “AWS Lambda provides us with extremely fast image resizing,” Grutko says. “Before, if we needed an image resized in 10 different sizes, it would happen serially. With AWS Lambda, all 10 images get created at the same time, so it’s quite a bit faster and it involves no server maintenance.” Rather than relying on a hosting service to fix inevitable systems issues, The Times now has complete control over its back-end environment, enabling it to troubleshoot problems as soon as they occur. “When an issue happens, we can go under the hood and troubleshoot to get around nearly any problem,” says Grutko. “It’s our environment, and we control it.” When the company encounters a problem that it can’t solve, it relies on AWS Support. “Our on-boarding experience was quite good with the AWS support team,” says Miles Van Pelt, senior development engineer at The Seattle Times. “It really felt like they went out of their way to answer our questions and research topics that we couldn't readily find in their extensive documentation.” By choosing AWS, The Seattle Times is now better positioned to deliver in its pursuit of being a leading-edge digital news media company. “By moving to AWS, we’ve regained the agility and flexibility we need to support the company’s journalistic mission without incurring the expense and demands required of a pile of physical hardware,” says Grutko .
After maintaining on-premises hardware and custom publishing software for nearly two decades, The Seattle Times sought to migrate its website publishing to a contemporary content management platform. To avoid the costs of acquiring and configuring new hardware infrastructure and the required staff to maintain it, the company initially chose a fully managed hosting vendor. But after several months, The Times' software engineering team found it had sacrificed flexibility and agility in exchange for less maintenance responsibility. As the hosted platform struggled with managing traffic under a vastly fluctuating load, The Seattle Times team was hamstrung in its ability to scale up to meet customer demand. Tom Bain, the software engineering manager overseeing the migration effort, says, "We had a fairly standard architecture in mind when we set out to do the migration, and we encouraged our vendor to adapt to our needs, but they struggled with the idea of altering their own business model to satisfy our very unique hosting needs."
Why Amazon Web Services To address these core scalability concerns, The Seattle Times engineering team considered several alternative hosting options, including self-hosting on premises, more flexible managed hosting options, and various cloud providers. The team concluded that the available cloud options provided the needed flexibility, appropriate architecture, and desired cost savings. The company ultimately chose Amazon Web Services (AWS), in part because of the maturity of the product offering and, most significantly, the auto-scaling capabilities built into the service. The Seattle Times' new software is built on the LAMP stack, and the added benefits of native, Linux-based cloud hosting made the most sense when choosing a new vendor. The Seattle Times developed a proof-of-concept and implementation plan, which was reviewed by a team from AWS Support. “They looked over our architecture and said, ‘Here are some things that we recommend you do, some best practices, and some lessons learned,’ ” says Rob Grutko, director of technology for The Seattle Times. “They were very helpful in making sure we were production ready.” After implementing the desired system architecture and vetting the chosen components and configuration with AWS, The Times deployed its new system in just six hours. The website moved to the AWS platform between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. and final testing was completed by 5 a.m. — in time for the next news day.
How Seattle Times Uses AWS Seattletimes.com is now hosted in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for resizable compute capacity and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for persistent block-level storage volumes. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) serves as a scalable cloud-based database, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a fully redundant infrastructure for storing and retrieving data, and Amazon Route 53 offers a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service. The Times is using Amazon CloudFront in front of several Amazon S3 buckets to distribute a huge collection of photo imagery. The combination of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 is used to embed photos into news stories distributed to The Times readers with low latency and high transfer speeds. Additionally, Amazon ElastiCache serves as an in-memory “cache in the cloud” in The Times’ new configuration. The Times is also using AWS Lambda to resize images for viewing on different devices such as desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.
The Benefits With AWS, The Seattle Times can now automatically scale up very rapidly to accommodate spikes in website traffic when big stories break, and scale down during slower traffic periods to reduce costs. “Auto-scaling is really the clincher to this,” Grutko says. “With AWS, we can now serve our online readers with speed and efficiency, scaling to meet demand and delivering a better reader experience.’’ Moreover, news images can now be rapidly resized for different viewing environments, allowing breaking-news stories to reach readers faster. “AWS Lambda provides us with extremely fast image resizing,” Grutko says. “Before, if we needed an image resized in 10 different sizes, it would happen serially. With AWS Lambda, all 10 images get created at the same time, so it’s quite a bit faster and it involves no server maintenance.” Rather than relying on a hosting service to fix inevitable systems issues, The Times now has complete control over its back-end environment, enabling it to troubleshoot problems as soon as they occur. “When an issue happens, we can go under the hood and troubleshoot to get around nearly any problem,” says Grutko. “It’s our environment, and we control it.” When the company encounters a problem that it can’t solve, it relies on AWS Support. “Our on-boarding experience was quite good with the AWS support team,” says Miles Van Pelt, senior development engineer at The Seattle Times. “It really felt like they went out of their way to answer our questions and research topics that we couldn't readily find in their extensive documentation.” By choosing AWS, The Seattle Times is now better positioned to deliver in its pursuit of being a leading-edge digital news media company. “By moving to AWS, we’ve regained the agility and flexibility we need to support the company’s journalistic mission without incurring the expense and demands required of a pile of physical hardware,” says Grutko .