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!