Media giant News International is progressively shifting its IT infrastructure from in-house data centres to the cloud, after deciding three years ago to shift from being a newspaper company to a multimedia company.
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That is the message of News International CIO Chris Taylor, who has overseen the shift, which includes the decision to erect paywalls around the company's core products.
"One of the first steps that we took was to virtualise as much of the IT estate as we possibly could," said Taylor. "We are at 90 per cent now and the last few servers in the data centre are literally those where the applications are just too old. They won't last too much longer, though, and we will be at 100 per cent [virtualised]."
While that was going on, in 2011, News International froze the footprint of its traditional data centres. Any future increase in compute power or new applications at News International would have to be met by the cloud, not by purchasing new servers. "In fact over the past two years, we've shrunk it by about 25 per cent and it's only going to get smaller from here," said Taylor.
He added: "We have got 20 per cent of our virtual machines working in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This represents about 600 virtual machines and this number is going up every day."
Taylor was speaking at the AWS Summit in London today, where he revealed that News International was one of the early adopters of AWS DynamoDB, Amazon's cloud-based database, which has enabled News International to migrate so much of its application stack to the cloud.
Although it had erected a paywall around its two major newspaper products - The Times and the Sunday Times - it needed to be able to set granular access rights to individual stories, or to enable a subscriber to share content over social media.
"We knew we wanted to use AWS EC2 instances, but we needed a technology that would enable us to control that granular access. Amazon gave us access to DynamoDB early. We were one of the first companies to work with it, and the second to launch a live product," said Taylor.
Amazon's DynamoDB NoSQL database underpins News International's Access Control System.
"The Amazon technology stack has enabled us to deal with over 45 million transactions a month based on just two mid-sized instances. The average response time to the system, granting and controlling access to our content, is 40 milliseconds," he said.
The system will also handle access control to The Sun newspaper when it shifts behind the paywall later this year. Running costs, he added, are "substantially lower" than running on-premise, although he did not give a figure.
