In this session, learn how The Economist approached migrating to the cloud and moving economist.com from legacy datacenters to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

1. The Economist
Migration to the Cloud
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure, The Economist

2. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Economist Migration to the Cloud
Overview
• Who am I
• The Economist
• Our journey to the cloud
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3. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Who am I
• Graduated Lehman college early 90s -masters in the early 2000s.
• Started my consulting firm in the late 80s
• Clients included IBM, NY Life, Met Life, The Economist, Westchester Chapter
of MS society, Video Villa….
• The Economist became my client in the 90s
• VP of Operations and Infrastructure.
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.3

4. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Smart – Our readers turn to The
Economist to make sense of the forces
that shape our future.
Trusted –The Economist is relied upon
as a filter of world affairs.
Bold – Founded to defend free trade,
The Economist is not afraid to advocate
for positive change.
Global – The only publication with a
dedicated section covering every region
in the world, every week.
Well-written – Readers value The
Economist’s distinct style of intelligence
and wit
Print Circulation
1.3MM Worldwide
765M North America
Digital Editions Weekly
Unique Devices
459M Worldwide
174M North America
The Economist
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5. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Journey to the cloud – Where we were
• Static, fully managed environment
• Long delays on adding components
• Delayed time to market
• Expensive!
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6. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Where we are going
• Azure - MS
• Softlayer - IBM
• Rackspace
• Next - Google
• Century Link Technologies (CLT)
• AWS
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7. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why Amazon Web Services
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Amazon is the industry recognized
leader in Cloud computing
(Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS).
Source: Gartner (May 2015)
.
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

8. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why Amazon Web Services
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.8
Project aim
Move Economist.com from legacy data centers
to Amazon’s cloud (Amazon Web Services).
Why Amazon?
Amazon already hosts thousands of high profile
business applications (web and enterprise)
today, including some large websites: Financial
Times, The Guardian, Time Inc., Drupal and
many more
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

9. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Partner selection process – How are we getting there
Which partner? - What are the attributes?
 Global presence
 Amazon Premiere partner
 Experienced – Similar projects
 Broad depth of knowledge – Varnish, apache 2.3, Drupal 6…
 Deep technical staff
 Best practices
 Knowledge handoff
 References
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.9
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

10. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
POC – Technical forks at every turn
 Linux – Redhat, AWS Linux
 MySQL – RDS
 NFS – NasShare- Zadara
 Memcache’d’ – ElastiCache
 Auto-scaling
 Cloud formation
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.10
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

11. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Multiple Availability Zones
 ELB
 Self healing
 Chaos Monkey
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.11
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

12. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Think independently
 Black box design – No domino effect
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.12
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

13. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Implement “elasticity”
 Auto-scaling
 ELB on multiple layers
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.13
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

14. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Implement “elasticity”
 Build security in every layer
 IAM – Identity & Access management
 MFA – 2FA
 SSL for data in transit
 Restrict IP access
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.14
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

15. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Implement “elasticity”
 Build security in every layer
 Don’t fear constraints
 If inhibited – Distribute load, cache
 Distribute IOPs for DB
 Delete instance and self heal
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.15
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

16. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Implement “elasticity”
 Build security in every layer
 Don’t fear constraints
 Think parallel
 Multi threading
 Leverage ELBs – round robin – weighted
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.16
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

17. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cloud design principles
 Design for failure and nothing fails
 Loose coupling sets you free
 Implement “elasticity”
 Build security in every layer
 Don’t fear constraints
 Think parallel
 Leverage storage options
 Instance, S3, NFS, Glacier, Redshift
© 2017 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.17
Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

18. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
Moving at light speed
 POC transforms to stage
 Production is built through Cloud Formation (4 hours)
 DR site built through Cloud Formation (2 hours)
 Test Dev, Stage and production
 Prepare for go-live
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Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

19. © 2016 Imperva, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Results
 Text book transition – 2 hours
 Several major partners on standby
(BrightCove, CDNetworks, Incapsula….)
 Team received accolades and awards for this success
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Brendan McPartlan
VP of Operations and Infrastructure
The Economist

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