The publisher had already realized several benefits of using AWS in its digital products, including the ability to use horizontal scaling to handle peaks in website traffic. When it came to its enterprise application migration, News UK found that AWS offered agility and maturity that other cloud providers did not. “AWS offers unique capability for handling the sorts of workloads we wanted to put in the cloud,” says Mike Wedderburn-Clarke, infrastructure architect at News UK. “In particular, the AWS focus on overall security, the ability to isolate systems from the Internet while running in the cloud, and the ability to encrypt data with our own managed keys addresses our requirements better than alternative solutions.” As a result, News UK was able to move 4 of its 6 datacenters to the AWS Cloud.

News UK also chose AWS for the customised and proactive nature of AWS Enterprise Support service. Traditional enterprise software was written to work on mainframes, with code written in the 1960s and keyed to certain CPUs. It can be challenging to transition systems between two computing models that were designed and built decades apart. “We needed help overcoming specific problems, like getting legacy software to take advantage of modern features like

When News UK opens a support case, the AWS Enterprise Support team engages to review the system and API calls and provides insight into ways to improve usage or revise code, all at first point of contact. All support activities are coordinated by a Technical Account Manager (TAM) who ensures that the News UK requirements are fully met. “You typically do not get this level of focused and personalized support in the IT industry,” says Wedderburn-Clarke.

Direct and immediate access to support is critical in News UK’s demanding operating environment. Birch cites IT service issues that could prevent publication of physical print titles and digital products, materially impacting readers, subscribers and advertisers. “Access to highly skilled engineers, backed up by a TAM who fully understands our needs, is the type of high-touch relationship that we really value with AWS,” Birch says. “Without that, we run the risk of not being able to print the newspaper.”

News UK formats and prints the newspaper in the evening and early morning of each day—which are also typical maintenance hours for servers. PDFs of each page are created and run through the publisher’s pre-publication software, Asura, which optimizes the PDFs for publication. Then the printing house creates plates from each PDF so that it can print millions of copies of the newspaper. It’s an intricate process that cannot be disrupted—and if servers are rebooted during that time, the results could be disastrous. “We wouldn’t be able to put the newspaper out,” Birch says. “We have a unique window of time to print the newspaper and distribute it every day. For every minute of delay, we lose thousands of newspaper sales—so it’s absolutely crucial that we stay up and running during that time.” News UK worked with the AWS Support team to ensure that multiple Availability Zones were ready to take on the workload, providing resilient, problem-free operations for the publisher and keeping News UK’s production and publication operations on schedule.

The company also leveraged the benefits of Auto Scaling to automate the creation and management of Windows Server instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Unhealthy systems are automatically identified, killed, and rebuilt without manual intervention. “We are doing more with approximately the same number of people. We’ve got an incredibly small, focused team, and we are able to deliver quickly,” Wedderburn-Clarke says.