LIONSGATE is a $2 billion diversified global entertainment corporation that produces feature films and television shows, which they distribute worldwide. Their products include the Emmy award-winning TV show Mad Men and the movie “Hunger Games”. Their productions appear in theaters, on TV, and online.

The Challenge
As a successful media and entertainment company, LIONSGATE was faced with IT challenges that confront many growing businesses:

• Ever-expanding infrastructure and costs

• Increasing enterprise application workloads

• Tighter time-to-market requirements

These challenges led to an exploration of cloud-based solutions for development and test workloads, production workloads for enterprise applications, and backup, archive, and disaster recovery strategies. The company’s objectives were to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and increase operational efficiency.

Why Amazon Web Services Theresa Miller, Executive Vice President, Information Technology for LIONSGATE, explains why the company decided to enlist Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help them meet these objectives: “The economics were compelling. AWS cloud services proved to be easy to use via the Management Console, APIs, and tools. The system is secure and flexible to work with. Also, working with AWS as a company was a very positive experience.”
LIONSGATE started using the following AWS products in 2010:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for Amazon EC2 storage

The Benefits Miller describes some of the results LIONSGATE has experienced as a result of working with AWS: “We are able to use AWS to reduce the time required to deploy infrastructure from weeks to days or hours; and to run production SharePoint workloads, and testing and development for our SAP applications. The much quicker turnaround has been a win for our department, and for the business in trying to be more agile and more responsive to what is going on in the marketplace.” Shahrazad McNeil, Vice President SAP Basis and Security Administration for LIONSGATE, adds: “The speed of building servers, disaster recovery, high availability, and better backup methods are really the wins that we will achieve using AWS.” The company avoided acquiring additional data center space, saving an estimated $1M+ over three years. “Overall,” says Miller, “we believe moving to AWS will save the company about 50 percent versus a traditional hosting facility.” AWS has also contributed to helping LIONSGATE maintain its systems security. Miller says, “AWS has provided a flexible means of securely extending our Datacenter to the cloud via their virtual private cloud [VPC] offering. We can leverage existing hardware/policies and procedures for a secure, seamless, and scalable computing environment that requires very little resources to manage.” Another important factor for LIONSGATE is running SAP, which is key to the company’s operations. McNeil was pleased with the smooth transition: “We wanted SAP to come in and give us a quick introduction to a new tool and this had to happen really fast. In pre-AWS times, we wouldn’t have been able to have the server available, but with AWS it took us two days to put the servers up and have SAP come and show us how to develop the apps and implement the project.” LIONSGATE’s future plans include moving SAP applications from the test and development environment into a full production environment. In terms of using AWS for other applications, Miller comments, “We have had such a positive experience; we would consider it for any type of application. We have been very, very happy with AWS’s response to all of our questions and our support needs.” McNeil agrees: “The AWS team is excited to work with us and they’re invested in our success.”

The Challenge
Yelp has established a loyal consumer following, due in large part to the fact that they are vigilant in protecting the user from shill or suspect content. Yelp uses an automated review filter to identify suspicious content and minimize exposure to the consumer. The site also features a wide range of other features that help people discover new businesses (lists, special offers, and events), and communicate with each other. Additionally, business owners and managers are able to set up free accounts to post special offers, upload photos, and message customers. The company has also been focused on developing mobile apps and was recently voted into the iTunes Apps Hall of Fame. Yelp apps are also available for Android, Blackberry, Windows 7, Palm Pre and WAP. Local search advertising makes up the majority of Yelp’s revenue stream. The search ads are colored light orange and clearly labeled “Sponsored Results.” Paying advertisers are not allowed to change or re-order their reviews.
Why Amazon Web Services Yelp originally depended upon giant RAIDs to store their logs, along with a single local instance of Hadoop. When Yelp made the move to Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), they replaced the RAIDs with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and immediately transferred all Hadoop jobs to Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
“We were running out of hard drive space and capacity on our Hadoop cluster,” says Yelp search and data-mining engineer Dave Marin. Yelp uses Amazon S3 to store daily logs and photos, generating around 1.2TB of logs per day. The company also uses Amazon EMR to power approximately 20 separate batch scripts, most of those processing the logs. Features powered by Amazon Elastic MapReduce include:

• People Who Viewed this Also Viewed

• Review highlights

• Auto complete as you type on search

• Search spelling suggestions

• Top searches

• Ads

Their jobs are written exclusively in Python, while Yelp uses their own open-source library, mrjob, to run their Hadoop streaming jobs on Amazon EMR, with boto to talk to Amazon S3. Yelp also uses s3cmd and the Ruby Elastic MapReduce utility for monitoring. Yelp developers advise others working with AWS to use the boto API as well as mrjob to ensure full utilization of Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows. Yelp runs approximately 250 Amazon Elastic MapReduce jobs per day, processing 30TB of data and is grateful for AWS Support that helped with their Hadoop application development. The Benefits Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce Yelp was able to save $55,000 in upfront hardware costs and get up and running in a matter of days not months. However, most important to Yelp is the opportunity cost. “With AWS, our developers can now do things they couldn’t before,” says Marin.“Our systems team can focus their energies on other challenges.”

 The Challenge Since its founding in 2012, Coinbase has quickly become the leader in bitcoin transactions. As it prepared to respond to ever-increasing customer demand for bitcoin transactions, the company knew it needed to invest in the right underlying technology. “We’re now in the phase of legitimizing this currency and bringing it to the masses,” says Rob Witoff , director at Coinbase . “As part of that, our core tenets are security, scalability, and availability.” Security is the most important of those tenets, according to Witoff . “We control hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin for our customers, placing us among the largest reserves in our industry,” says Witoff . “Just as a traditional bank would heavily guard its customers’ assets inside a physical bank vault, we take the same or greater precautions with our servers.” Scalability is also critical because Coinbase needs to be able to elastically scale its services globally without consuming precious engineering resources. “As a startup, we’re meticulous about where we invest our time,” says Witoff . “We want to focus on how our customers interact with our product and the services we’re offering. We don’t want to reinvent solutions to already-solved foundational infrastructure.” Coinbase also strives to give its developers more time to focus on innovation. “We have creative, envelope-pushing engineers who are driving our startup with innovative new services that balance a delightful experience with uncompromising security,” says Witoff . “That’s why we need to have our exchange on something we know will work.” Additionally, Coinbase sought a better data analytics solution. “We generate massive amounts of data from the top to the bottom of our infrastructure that would traditionally be stored in a remote and dated warehouse. But we’ve increasingly focused on adopting new technologies without losing a reliable, trusted core,” says Witoff . “At the same time, we wanted the best possible real-time insight into how our services are running.” To support its goals, Coinbase decided to deploy its new bitcoin exchange in the cloud. “When I joined Coinbase in 2014, the company was bootstrapped by quite a few third-party hosting providers,” says Witoff . “But because we’re managing actual value and real assets on our machines, we needed to have complete control over our environment.”

Why Amazon Web Services Coinbase evaluated different cloud technology vendors in late 2014, but it was most confident in Amazon Web Services (AWS). In his previous role at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Witoff gained experience running secure and sensitive workloads on AWS. Based on this, Witoff says he “came to trust a properly designed AWS cloud.” The company began designing the new Coinbase Exchange by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which securely controls access to AWS services. “Cloud computing provides an API for everything, including accidentally destroying the company,” says Witoff . “We think security and identity and access management done correctly can empower our engineers to focus on products within clear and trusted walls, and that’s why we implemented an auditable self-service security foundation with AWS IAM.” The exchange runs inside the Coinbase production environment on AWS, powered by a custom-built transactional data engine alongside Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances and PostgreSQL databases. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances also power the exchange. The organization provides reliable delivery of its wallet and exchange to global customers by distributing its applications natively across multiple AWS Availability Zones. Coinbase created a streaming data insight pipeline in AWS, with real-time exchange analytics processed by an Amazon Kinesis managed big-data processing service. “All of our operations analytics are piped into Kinesis in real time and then sent to our analytics engine so engineers can search, query, and find trends from the data,” Witoff says. “We also take that data from Kinesis into a separate disaster recovery environment.” Coinbase also integrates the insight pipeline with AWS CloudTrail log files, which are sent to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, then to the AWS Lambda compute service, and on to Kinesis containers based on Docker images. This gives Coinbase complete, transparent, and indexed audit logs across its entire IT environment. Every day, 1 TB of data—about 1 billion events—flows through that path. “Whenever our security groups or network access controls are modified, we see alerts in real time, so we get full insight into everything happening across the exchange,” says Witoff . For additional big-data insight, Coinbase uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), a web service that uses the Hadoop open-source framework to process data, and Amazon Redshift, a managed petabyte-scale data warehouse. “We use Amazon EMR to crunch our growing databases into structured, actionable Redshift data that tells us how our company is performing and where to steer our ship next,” says Witoff . All of the company’s networks are designed, built, and maintained through AWS CloudFormation templates. “This gives us the luxury of version-controlling our network, and it allows for seamless, exact network duplication for on-demand development and staging environments,” says Witoff . Coinbase also uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints to optimize throughput to Amazon S3, and Amazon WorkSpaces to provision cloud-based desktops for global workers. “As we scale our services around the world, we also scale our team. We rely on Amazon WorkSpaces for on-demand access by our contractors to appropriate slices of our network,” Witoff says. Coinbase launched the U.S. Coinbase Exchange on AWS in February 2015, and recently expanded to serve European users.

The Benefits Coinbase is able to securely store its customers’ funds using AWS. “I consider Amazon’s cloud to be our own private cloud, and when we deploy something there, I trust that my staff and administrators are the only people who have access to those assets,” says Witoff . “Also, securely storing bitcoin remains a major focus area for us that has helped us gain the trust of consumers across the world. Rather than spending our resources replicating and securing a new data center with solved challenges, AWS has allowed us to hone in on one of our core competencies: securely storing private keys.” Coinbase has also relied on AWS to quickly grow its customer base. “In three years, our bitcoin wallet base has grown from zero to more than 3 million. We’ve been able to drive that growth by providing a fast, global wallet service, which would not be possible without AWS,” says Witoff . Additionally, the company has better visibility into its business with its insight pipeline. “Using Kinesis for our insight pipeline, we can provide analytical insights to our engineering team without forcing them to jump through complex hoops to traverse our information,” says Witoff . “They can use the pipeline to easily view all the metadata about how the Coinbase Exchange is performing.” And because Kinesis provides a one-to-many analytics delivery method, Coinbase can collect metrics in its primary database as well as through new, experimental data stores. “As a result, we can keep up to speed with the latest, greatest, most exciting tools in the data science and data analytics space without having to take undue risk on unproven technologies,” says Witoff . As a startup company that built its bitcoin exchange in the cloud from day one, Coinbase has more agility than it would have had if it created the exchange internally. “By starting with the cloud at our core, we’ve been able to move fast where others dread,” says Witoff . “Evolving our network topology, scaling across the globe, and deploying new services are never more than a few actions away. This empowers us to spend more time thinking about what we want to do instead of what we’re able to do.” That agility is helping Coinbase meet the demands of fast business growth. “Our exchange is in hyper-growth mode, and we’re in the process of scaling it all across the world,” says Witoff . “For each new country we bring on board, we are able to scale geographically and at the touch of a button launch more machines to support more users.” By using AWS, Coinbase can concentrate even more on innovation. “We trust AWS to manage the lowest layers of our stack, which helps me sleep at night,” says Witoff . “And as we go higher up into that stack—for example, with our insight pipeline—we are able to reach new heights as a business, so we can focus on innovating for the future of finance.”

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.”

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been working around the world—and off of it—for almost 60 years, trying to answer some basic questions: What’s out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
Exploring Space: No Rocket Science Degree Needed Have you ever looked up at night and wondered about the mysteries of space? Or marveled at the expansiveness of our galaxy? You can easily explore all this and more at the NASA Image and Video Library, which provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos—documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. For NASA, providing the public with such easy access to the wonders of space has been a journey all its own. NASA began providing online access to photos, video, and audio in the early 2000’s, when media capture began to shift from analog and film to digital. Before long, each of NASA’s 10 field centers was making its imagery available online, including digitized versions of some older assets. Therein was the challenge: “With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge of NASA to know where to look,” says Rodney Grubbs, imagery experts program manager at NASA. “If you wanted a video of the space shuttle launch, you had to go to the Kennedy Space Center website. If you wanted pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you went to the Goddard Space Flight Center website. With 10 different centers and dozens of distributed image collections, it took a lot of digging around to find what you wanted.” Early efforts to provide a one-stop shop consisted of essentially “scraping” content from the different sites, bringing it together in one place, and layering a search engine on top. “In large part, those initial efforts were unsuccessful because each center categorized its imagery in different ways,” says Grubbs. “As a result, we often had five to six copies of the same image, each described in different ways, which made searches difficult and delivered a poor user experience.” In 2011, NASA decided that the best approach to address this issue was to start over. By late 2014, all the necessary pieces for a second attempt were in place:

• The Imagery Experts Program had developed and published a common metadata standard, which all NASA’s centers had adopted.

• The Web Enterprise Service Technologies (WESTPrime) service contract, one of five agency-wide service contracts under NASA’s Enterprise Services program, provided a delivery vehicle for building and managing the new site.

• The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

“We wanted to build our new solution in the cloud for two reasons,” says Grubbs. “By 2014, like with many government agencies, NASA was trying to get away from buying hardware and building data centers, which are expensive to build and manage. The cloud also provided the ability to scale with ease, as needed, paying for only the capacity we use instead of having to make a large up-front investment.”
Decades of NASA Achievements – All in One Place Development of the new NASA Image and Video Library was handled by the Web Services Office within NASA’s Enterprise Service and Integration Division. Technology selection, solution design, and implementation was managed by InfoZen, the WESTPrime contract service provider. As an Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), InfoZen chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Amazon was the largest cloud services provider, had a strong government cloud presence, and offered the most suitable cloud in terms of elasticity,” recalls Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager at InfoZen. NASA formally launched its Image and Video Library in March 2017. Key features include:

• A user interface that automatically scales for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones across virtually every browser and operating system.

• A search interface that lets people easily find what they’re looking for, including the ability to choose from gallery view or list view and to narrow-down search results by media type and/or by year.

• The ability to easily download any media found on the site—or share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

• Access to the metadata associated with each asset, such as file size, file format, which center created the asset, and when it was created. When available, users can also view EXIF/camera data for still images such as exposure, shutter speed, and lens used.

• An application programming interface (API) for automated uploads of new content—including integration with NASA’s existing authentication mechanism.

Architecture The NASA Image and Video Library is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). In building the solution, InfoZen took advantage of the following Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This enables NASA to scale up under load and scale down during periods of inactivity to save money, and pay for only what it uses.

• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which is used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.

• Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.

• Amazon Elastic Transcoder, which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.

• Amazon CloudSearch, which is used to support searching by free text or fields.

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.

• AWS CloudFormation, which enables automated creation, updating, and destruction of AWS resources. InfoZen also used the Troposphere library, which enables the creation of objects via AWS CloudFormation using Python instead of hand-coded JSON—each object representing one AWS resource such as an instance, an Elastic IP (EIP) address, or a security group.

• Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

An Image and Video Library for the Future Through its use of AWS, with support from InfoZen, NASA is making its vast wealth of pictures, videos, and audio files—previously in some 60 “collections” across NASA’s 10 centers—easily discoverable in one centralized location, delivering these benefits:

• Easy Access to the Wonders of Space. The Image and Video Library automatically optimizes the user experience for each user’s particular device. It is also fully compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make their technology solutions accessible to people with disabilities. Captions can be turned on or off for videos played on the site, and text-based caption files can be downloaded for any video.

• Built-in Scalability. All components of the NASA Image and Video Library are built to scale on demand, as needed to handle usage spikes. “On-demand scalability will be invaluable for events such as the solar eclipse that’s happening later this summer—both as we upload new media and as the public comes to view that content,” says Bryan Walls, Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager at NASA.

• Good Use of Taxpayer Dollars. By building its Image and Video Library in the cloud, NASA avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, the agency can simply pay for the AWS resources it uses at any given time.

While NASA’s new Image and Video Library delivers a wealth of new convenience and capabilities, for people like Grubbs and Walls, it’s just the beginning. “We now have an agile, scalable foundation on which to do all kinds of amazing things,” says Walls. “Much like with the exploration of space, we’re just starting to imagine all that we can do with it.”

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 .

Expedia Increases Agility and Resiliency by Going All In on AWS Expedia is all in on AWS, with plans to migrate 80 percent of its mission-critical apps from its on-premises data centers to the cloud in the next two to three years. By using AWS, Expedia has become more resilient. Expedia’s developers have been able to innovate faster while saving the company millions of dollars. Expedia provides travel-booking services across its flagship site Expedia.com and about 200 other travel-booking sites around the world.

About Expedia

Expedia, Inc. is a leading online travel company, providing leisure and business travel to customers worldwide. Expedia’s extensive brand portfolio includes Expedia.com, one of the world’s largest full service online travel agency, with sites localized for more than 20 countries; Hotels.com, the hotel specialist with sites in more than 60 countries; Hotwire.com, the hotel specialist with sites in more than 60 countries, and other travel brands.  The company delivers consumer value in leisure and business travel, drives incremental demand and direct bookings to travel suppliers, and provides advertisers the opportunity to reach a highly valuable audience of in-market travel consumers through Expedia Media Solutions. Expedia also powers bookings for some of the world’s leading airlines and hotels, top consumer brands, high traffic websites, and thousands of active affiliates through Expedia Affiliate Network.

The Challenge

Expedia is committed to continuous innovation, technology, and platform improvements to create a great experience for its customers. The Expedia Worldwide Engineering (EWE) organization supports all websites under the Expedia brand. Expedia began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2010 to launch Expedia Suggest Service (ESS), a typeahead suggestion service that helps customers enter travel, search, and location information correctly. According to the company’s metrics, an error page is the main reason for site abandonment. Expedia wanted global users to find what they were looking for quickly and without errors. At the time, Expedia operated all its services from data centers in Chandler, AZ. The engineering team realized that they had to run ESS in locations physically close to customers to enable a quick and responsive service with minimal network latency. Why Amazon Web Services Expedia considered on-premises virtualization solutions as well as other cloud providers, but ultimately chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it was the only solution with the global infrastructure in place to support Asia Pacific customers.

“From an architectural perspective, infrastructure, automation, and proximity to the customer were key factors,” explains Murari Gopalan, Technology Director. “There was no way for us to solve the problem without AWS.”

Launching ESS on AWS

“Using AWS, we were able to build and deliver the ESS service within three months,” says Magesh Chandramouli, Principal Architect.

ESS uses algorithms based on customer location and aggregated shopping and booking data from past customers to display suggestions when a customer starts typing. For example, if a customer in Seattle entered sea when booking a flight, the service would display Seattle, SeaTac, and other relevant destinations.  Expedia launched ESS instances initially in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region and then quickly replicated the service in the US West (Northern California) and EU (Ireland) Regions. Expedia engineers initially used Apache Lucene and other open source tools to build the service, but eventually developed powerful tools in-house to store indexes and queries.  By deploying ESS on AWS, Expedia was able to improve service to customers in the Asia Pacific region as well as Europe.

“Latency was our biggest issue,” says Chandramouli. “Using AWS, we decreased average network latency from 700 milliseconds to less than 50 milliseconds.” 

Running Critical Applications on AWS

By 2011, Expedia was running several critical, high-volumes applications on AWS, such as the Global Deals Engine (GDE). GDE delivers deals to its online partners and allows them to create custom websites and applications using Expedia APIs and product inventory tools.  Expedia provisions Hadoop clusters using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) to analyze and process streams of data coming from Expedia’s global network of websites, primarily clickstream, user interaction, and supply data, which is stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Expedia processes approximately 240 requests per second. “The advantage of AWS is that we can use Auto Scaling to match load demand instead of having to maintain capacity for peak load in traditional datacenters,” comments Gopalan. Expedia uses AWS CloudFormation with Chef to deploy its entire front and backend stack into its Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment. Expedia uses a multi-region, multi-availability zone architecture with a proprietary DNS service to add resiliency to the applications. Figure 2 demonstrates the architecture of the GDE service on AWS. Expedia can add a new cluster to manage GDE and other high volume applications without worrying about the infrastructure.

“If we had to host the same applications on our on-premises data center, we wouldn’t have the same level of CPU efficiency,” says Chandramouli. “If an application processes 3,000 requests per second, we would have to configure our physical servers to run at about 30 percent capacity to avoid boxes running hot. On AWS, we can push CPU consumption close to 70 percent because we can always scale out. Fundamentally, running in AWS enables a 230 percent CPU consumption efficiency in data processing. We run our critical applications on AWS because we can scale and use the infrastructure efficiently.”

Using IAM to Manage Security

To simplify the management of GDE, Expedia developed an identity federation broker that uses AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) and the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS). The federation broker allows systems administrators and developers to use their existing Windows Active Directory (AD) accounts to single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console. In doing so, Expedia eliminates the need to create IAM users and maintain multiple environments where user identities are stored. Federation broker users sign into their Windows machines with their existing Active Directory credentials, browse to the federation broker, and transparently log into the AWS Management Console. This allows Expedia to enforce password and permissions management within their existing directory and to enforce group policies and other governance rules. Additionally, if an employee ever leaves the company or takes a different role, Expedia simply make changes to Active Directory to revoke or changes AWS permissions for the user instead of inside of AWS.

Standardizing Application Deployment

The success of the ESS and GDE services sparked interest from other Expedia development teams, who began to use AWS for regional initiatives. By 2012, Expedia was hosting applications in the US East (Northern Virginia), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (Northern California) Regions. Expedia Worldwide Engineering culled best practices from these initiatives to create a standardized deployment setup across all Regions. As Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa, Principal Software Engineer explains,

“We’re using Chef to automate the configuration of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) servers. We can take any AWS image and use scripts stored in Chef to build a machine and spin up an instance customized for a team in just in a few minutes.”

The team consolidated all AWS accounts under one AWS account and provisioned one Amazon VPC network in each Region. This allows each Region to have an isolated infrastructure with a separate firewall, application layer, and database layer. Expedia applies Amazon EC2 Security Group firewall settings to safeguard applications and services. Amazon VPC is completely integrated into Expedia’s lab and production environments.

“The Amazon VPC experience for the developer is totally seamless,” says Bates-Kobashigawa. “Developers use the same Active Directory service for authentication and may not even know that some of the servers that they log onto are running on AWS. It feels like a physical infrastructure with its own subnets and multiple layers, and it’s also easy to connect to our on-premises infrastructure using VPN.”

Expedia uses a blue-green deployment approach to create parallel production environments on AWS, enabling continuous deployment and faster time-to-market.

“One of our metrics for success is the reduction of time to deploy within our teams,” says Gopalan. “We use this method to launch applications pretty quickly compared to a traditional deployment. Moreover, reducing the cost of a rollback to zero means we can be fearless with deployments.” 

The Benefits

Expedia uses AWS to develop applications faster, scale to process large volumes of data, and troubleshoot issues quickly. By using AWS to build a standard deployment model, development teams can quickly create the infrastructure for new initiatives. Critical applications run in multiple Availability Zones in different Regions to ensure data is always available and to enable disaster recovery. Expedia Worldwide Engineering is working on building a monitoring infrastructure in all Regions and moving to a single infrastructure. Generally, teams have more control over development and operations on AWS. When Expedia experienced conversion issues for its Client Logging service, engineers were able to track and identify critical issues within two days. Expedia estimates that it would have taken six weeks to find the script errors if the service ran in a physical environment.  Previously, Expedia had to provision servers for a full-load scenario in its data centers.

“To deploy an application using our on-site facility, you have to think about the physical infrastructure,” Bates-Kobashigawa explains. “If there are 100 boxes running, you might have to take 20 boxes out to apply new code. Using AWS, we don’t have to take capacity out; we just add new capacity and send traffic to it.”

Chandramouli comments, “When I was developer, you didn’t want to invest in architecture if you didn’t know how the application would turn out. I had to plan upfront and build a proof of concept to present to stakeholders. By using AWS, I’m not bound by throughput limitations or CPU capacity. When I think of AWS, freedom is the first word that comes to mind.”