To help it develop a personalized recommendation system, The Globe and Mail tapped Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ClearScale, a San Francisco–based systems integration, application development, and managed services firm. “We had already been prototyping a number of recommendation algorithms on AWS, and it had been a great experience, so we decided to take the next step of using AWS for our official platform,” explains O’Neill.

An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, ClearScale helped The Globe implement its recommendation system quickly and cost-effectively. The firm partnered with The Globe to build a recommendation engine that can work at scale so that recommendations for the next set of articles are ready by the time the reader has loaded the current article. ClearScale quickly accomplished that goal, building a robust, customized personalized recommendation engine that can be expanded to The Globe’s web and mobile platforms without any changes—and completing its work under tight timelines. “The fact that AWS offers an end-to-end solution made the development process quick and seamless,” says ClearScale CEO Pavel Pragin. “The Globe was able to get the advanced customization capabilities it needed without the expense of piecing together disparate software.”

The Globe’s personalized recommendation system uses several AWS services.

Amazon Kinesis is used to collect massive amounts of information including user clicks, article engagement, and article metadata. Amazon DynamoDB serves as the fast and flexible database in which to store this data. And Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) processes the data, distributing the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running on AWS.

Working with ClearScale, The Globe adopted a DevOps approach for infrastructure automation. ClearScale created templates for deploying each component of the infrastructure, which makes it more flexible, scalable, and redundant. Management of The Globe's production, staging, and development environments on AWS was made easier with

AWS CloudFormation, which gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of AWS resources, and AWS OpsWorks, a configuration management service that helps users configure and operate applications using Chef automation. With these tools in place, conditions such as CPU and memory utilization are automatically monitored, eliminating the need to manually add servers.

The newspaper also uses

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for secure, durable, highly scalable object storage, Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) for resizable compute capacity, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for queuing messages, and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the performance of the system. “For the solution to work, everything had to be completely automated,” says Pragin. “Moreover, all the components had to be 100 percent scalable to accommodate spikes in user demand and to allow the newspaper to grow.”

The personal recommendation engine has positioned The Globe and Mail to deliver relevant content to its audiences at a time of evolving online choices for news and information. “I was impressed with ClearScale’s ability to deliver such a complex yet robust, custom system within our tight timeless,” O’Neill says. “They are extremely capable—we chose the right vendor.”