News UK explains how and why it went cloud first on AWS
The newspaper publisher has built a yes-no model to test whether workloads are cloud-ready
Newspaper publisher News UK is part of the multinational media company News Corps. It shares with its parent a global objective to put 75 per cent of its infrastructure into the cloud by July 2017.
Danny Tedora, transformation programme manager at News UK gave the audience at the Computing Cloud and Infrastructure Summit some pointers as to how this is being achieved.
While the company has been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for some time, it has only recently started moving enterprise applications out of house.
"It had been simply our digital estate, websites, tablets and smartphone offerings that were housed in the cloud but we're increasingly moving enterprise workloads too. We have a cloud-first strategy. With any new projects coming in, the board have to justify why they will be housed in the data centre."
While it is usually not technically difficult, moving enterprise applications and data into the cloud requires a lot more governance, Tedora explained.
"People would ask how you're going to monitor this, you really should back it up, how we can secure it and make sure that security is in place."
This led to News UK building authentication, access control, monitoring and backup capabilities into AWS, and by doing so creating a framework that can be broadly applied to many migrations. As an enterprise AWS customer News UK also makes full use of the AWS tools that come with that type of subscription, including Cloud Health and Trusted Advisor, which it deploys to monitor exactly what is going on, to optimise costs and to highlight security risks.
"We bought rather expensive enterprise support and it's worth every penny," he said, in response to an audience question about how News UK manages to get good service out of Amazon, adding: "I guess we're lucky because we have the whole of News Corps as a draw."
The move to place as much as possible in AWS came after a bad experience when a third-party paywall system was instigated at the Sunday Times in 2011.
"We had a very uncomfortable period over six months where we found that all our Sunday Times users log in between eight and 10 on a Sunday morning and our authentication system couldn't take the workload," Tedora said.
This eventually led to the paywall being taken down and content being given away for free.
"We had unhappy customers sitting in their pyjamas, unhappy managers and engineers, free content and bad publicity - not a great story," said Tedora.
The problem was solved by creating an access control system (ACS) in AWS with elasticity and autoscaling capabilities.
"It works marvellously. We now have happy customers, a happy infrastructure team and a good story to tell," Tedora said.
Making the case
Not everything is suitable for migration to the cloud, but Tedora said that by leaning on AWS through the firm's enterprise support contract, even applications whose vendors say they are unsuitable can be made to work in the cloud.
The main barrier, though, is making a business case, particularly when the return on investment is questionable, said Tedora, who added that there are always ways to make an argument if you really feel it's the best option for other reasons.
"Cloud providers will always tell you it makes financial sense but we found many workloads that simply don't. Depending on how keen you are you can generally always make the case anyway, though: build in enough hardware refreshes for comparison, be patient with your ROI, you'll get there..."
Tedora advised getting all stakeholders involved early in any migration project, and particularly not to neglect the security and privacy specialists.
"Talk to service owners, whoever interfaces with the business from a technology perspective. Ask them to make sure the business is happy. Finance - you're moving from capex to opex so make sure they are on board with that," he said.
"Also I'd advise everybody to get the data security and privacy teams in early in your decision-making. Do it early or they'll crawl all over you later."
On the question of security, Tedora said the relevant people are now happy that it is as good or better in AWS as on-premise.
"We had some very interesting conversations with our security team. When we sat down and compared how much we spend on security with how much AWS spend on security and the level of tooling that's available it really helped to persuade them that in most cases it was the right way to go," he said.
Cloud-ready test
Tedora and his team have created a binary test for whether a particular application is cloud-ready.
"We worked with our infrastructure support partners and AWS and put together a survey and a methodology whereby we interview stakeholders, service owners, service managers and very quickly get to fairly binary yes or no as to whether it should go in the cloud," he said.
Using this test Tedora's team has found that 80 per cent of workloads at News UK are suitable for the cloud using the technical, security and financial criteria in the model. There is a third option too, he added: decommissioning services that are not needed any more.
"We had 3,500 servers, 90 per cent of which were VMs. We managed to decommission 400 of those. The best migration in terms of cost savings is decommissioning, right?"