1. NYTimes.com
Vadim Jelezniakov
AWS Summit 2011

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

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

4. NYTimes.com’s
Stats
In the US:38.1 mil unique users /
month810 mil page views / month
Worldwide:62 mil unique users /
month984 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Comments on Articles and Blogs

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

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

15. Traffic Spikes - Add Capacity

16. Load Balancing / Security View

17. Everyone’s Favorites:
Development Instances!

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

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

27. Progress So Far

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

29. NYTimes.com EC2
Expansion
2009 2011
EC2 DC in comparison with other DCs
from 5% to 40% (VMs/instances count)

30. NYTimes.com EC2
Expansion
EC2 contributes ~26% of total operational cost across DCs
(space, power, bandwidth)

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

32. email: vadimj@nytimes.com
twitter: @vadimj
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/skimme
r/
http://timesmachine.nytimes.co
m
http://open.nytimes.com
http://github.com/nimbul/
images licensed from
http://www.dreamstime.com/