Chris Birch has worked in IT for 24 years and is now the IT Director at News UK. He moved News UK's Access Control System to AWS, allowing it to handle unlimited transactions for under $4000 per month. News UK now runs 35% of its computing on AWS, supplemented by other cloud services. They have over 1200 AWS instances running daily, costing around $150,000 per month. News UK is working to move approximately 75% of its computing to the cloud over the next 3 years to consolidate its 46 datacenters worldwide.

1. Relaxing on Sunday Morning’s
with the Sunday Times (again)
Chris Birch
IT Director, News UK

2. Chris Birch – IT Director
• 24 years working in Technology Enterprise
– Started in1990 as Trainee Mainframe Computer Operator on IBM 3090 / 400J
• I wear a suit!
• I love ITIL
• Risk averse
• I’m definitely not cool
• I’m definitely an Enterprise guy

3. Sunday Morning pre AWS
• 150,000+ Digital subscribers attempting to login between
08:00 – 10:00hrs
• System limited to 17 TPS
• Access System failed ‘closed’
• Sunday morning incident bridges required

4. Access Control System
• Built system in AWS with autoscale capability
• Now able to handle unlimited transactions
• Costs less than $4000 per month

5. Our Journey to the Cloud
Amazon Web Services now provides over 35% of computing for News
UK, supplemented with SaaS offerings like Salesforce and GAAPS
• Today we have around 1200 instances running during the day, at some points this increases by
over 500 or so during specific scenarios
• i.e. Launch of Sun +
• 110 TB of disk capacity in-use, 2000 Compute units
• 450 million transactions a month (ACS)
• Costs around $150K per month, hold on, now it’s $120K per month following the price
reductions announced last month

6. Implemented Datacentre 3 in December 2013
• Resilient Direct connect links installed between our datacentres & AWS
• Using Cloud Formation and Chef Scripting for:
– All Dev, Pre-Production & Production VPC's with corresponding VPN's
– Resilient NAT infrastructure
– RODC capability
– LDAP and DNS capability
– Automated software deployment (Anthill)
– Chef capability using Cloud formation and Chef scripts
– Network Files Share capability using Cloud formation and Chef scripts proved
• Backup capability using Storage Gateway,S3 and Glacier automated through
Cloud formation and Chef scripts
• Monitoring capability built using Cloud formation and running Zabbix and MS
SCOM

7. The Journey continues…..
• News Corporation Global Application assessment completed – Enterprise applications are our
key focus.
• Now building detailed 3 year plan to move approximately 75% of compute to the Cloud
• This will contribute to the consolidation of 46 datacentres worldwide down to 6, then to zero

8. Why it makes financial sense!

9. Thanks for listening!