Vadim Jelezniakov from The New York Times Company discussed their use of AWS. NYTimes.com has over 38 million monthly US users and 984 million global page views. They moved to AWS for on-demand availability, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility. Examples included migrating 130 years of archives to S3 in 36 hours and rapidly scaling a new product called Skimmer from a prototype to production in 1 hour. They have since expanded their use of AWS to support 27% of their total operational costs across data centers.

1. NYTimes.com
Vadim Jelezniakov
AWS Summit 2011
1

2. Next 10 min
The Company
Why Cloud
The App Examples
Progress So Far
What’s Next
2

3. The New York Times Company
The New York Times
The International Herald Tribune
The Boston Globe
15 daily newspapers
50 Web sites
NYTimes.com
Boston.com
About.com
3

4. NYTimes.com’s Stats
In the US:
38.1 mil unique users / month
810 mil page views / month
Worldwide:
62 mil unique users / month
984 mil page views / month
#1 individual newspaper site
#2 media site bloggers link to the most*
#4 news and information Web site
comScore Report, April 2011
*Technorati's index
4

5. Why Cloud? Why AWS?
On Demand Availability Cost-Effective
Scalability IaaS = Flexible
Rapid Deployment Comprehensive
5

6. Why Cloud? Why AWS?
On Demand Availability Cost-Effective
Scalability IaaS = Flexible
Rapid Deployment Comprehensive
6

7. Why Cloud? Why AWS?
On Demand Availability Cost-Effective
Scalability IaaS = Flexible
Rapid Deployment Comprehensive
7

8. Examples
On Demand Capacity -
TimesMachine
Flexibility - Times Skimmer
Scalability - User Generated
Content (Comments)
8

9. TimesMachine (2007, 2008)
130 years of archives in 36 hours
400K objects, 4T of data
S3, EC2, Hadoop
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com
9

10. Skimmer Private Beta (Feb 14th, 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/
10

11. “SkimmerGate”
11:00 News leaks to
TechCrunch, Google Finance
11:10 Average load on the
instance is 40
11:15 Snapshotting the
instance, configuring the LB,
testing
12:00 Four Skimmer
instances load balanced,
quality is restored
1 hour - from prototype to
production
11

12. Comments on Articles and Blogs
12

13. Rate and Review for Movies,
Theater, Dining and Travel
13

14. We like
To be able to scale
quickly on demand
We don’t like
calls from Systems team
at 6PM on Fridays
14

15. Traffic Spikes - Add Capacity
15

16. Traffic Spikes - Add Capacity
15

17. Load Balancing / Security View
16

18. Everyone’s Favorites:
Development Instances!
17

19. Gap Analysis
• Load Balancing
• Communication between instances
• Talking back to existing Datacenter
• Scaling up and back
• Securing the instances
18

20. 19

21. 20

22. 21

23. 22

24. 23

25. 24

26. 25

27. Tools Developed for the Cloud
Nimbul
Light Cloud Manager
http://github.com/nimbul/nimbul
Emissary
Fast AMQP Messaging
http://github.com/nimbul/emissary
CloudSource
Simple SVN Deployment
http://github.com/nimbul/cloudsource
based on ServerMattic developed by WordPress
26

28. Progress So Far
27

29. NYTimes.com EC2 Expansion
Clusters: from 2 to 100. Instances: from 30 to 400.
28

30. NYTimes.com EC2 Expansion
2009 2011
EC2 DC in comparison with other DCs
from 4% to 36%
(VMs/pure physical servers/instance count)
29

31. NYTimes.com AWS Expansion
AWS contributes ~27% of total operational cost across DCs
(including space, power, bandwidth and excluding CDN)
30

32. What’s Next
Multi-AZ and Multi-Region
SNS, SNS2SQS - in Dev
Multi-AZ MySQL RDS
Need 'smarter' ELB
Need multi-AZ support in VPC
31

33. email: vadimj@nytimes.com
twitter: @vadimj
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com
http://open.nytimes.com
http://github.com/nimbul/
images licensed from
http://www.dreamstime.com/
charts generated using google docs
32