Inside Election Night at The New York Times: Panic in the Newsroom and the Role of Fastly
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Over the past two decades, The New York Times has successfully made the transition to a digital-first company while maintaining its reputation as one of the most trusted news sources in the world. CTO Nick Rockwell discusses the latest steps in the Times’ journey: implementing Fastly in preparation for record traffic during the 2016 presidential election. He covers the impact the NYT saw to backend load and to global performance, as well as the long-term implications for their infrastructure. And of course, he also discusses the timeline of election night, and how surprise and unpredictability led to rapid shifts in reader behavior and the NYT’s response.
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Inside Election Night at The New York Times: Panic in the Newsroom and the Role of Fastly
- 2. Inside Election Night at The New York Times Or, Panic in the Newsroom... Nick Rockwell, CTO NYT @nicksrockwell 03.21.17
- 3. Part I Oh sh!t, the election is coming up!
- 4. Preparation, News Style... Good: Ready for Anything Better: Ready for Anything + Exhaustive Prep
- 5. Pre-Post-Mortem ✘ Who’s responsible? ✘ What if something goes wrong? ✘ Oh it did go wrong in 2012… ✘ What if there’s more load than we expect? ✓ Team, Roles & Responsibilities ✓ Build an Election Night Runbook (16 pages!) ✓ Dry runs around debates ✓ Integrate a CDN...
- 6. Timeline 8/21 - Olympics are a wrap 8/24 - First Election prep meeting 9/21 - Meet w/ Fastly 9/23 - Commit to using Fastly 10/25 - In production 11/5 - Agreement signed 11/8 - Election night!
- 8. Hello Fastly Jon: can use 90 80 70, ok 60 percent of VCL code.
- 9. Plan B for Elections 8 Additional www-varnish for content requests 8 Additional www-varnish for userinfo requests 8 Additional www-fe (just in case) 4 Additional www-varnish for elections app Mobileweb and video load tests next week to inform possible buildout Final test tonight for MobileWeb Also Auth Scaling, Warming Amazon ELBs.. etc..
- 10. Part II Why a CDN, why Fastly?
- 12. You already know this but... “A DDoS attack is like someone anonymously placing a press ad including your phone number and offering an Aston Martin for sale at $200. You’re bombarded by calls, your life is misery, the callers aren’t aware they’re part of a trick, and your attacker is almost impossible to trace.” - https://www.sidewaysdictionary.com/
- 13. Joys of CDN Obvious: � Scaled caching � Better performance due to edge delivery � DDoS protection Slightly less obvious: � Consistent performance � Better everything - TLS negotation, compression, etc. � Cascading effects of smaller, simpler infrastructure
- 14. Keynote Homepage US Avg
- 15. Pingdom EU
- 16. Catchpoint TLS negotiation time (lower is better) Fastly Our Datacenter
- 18. What is risk? It’s not risk if someone else is responsible. It’s not risk if there’s no chance of consequential failure. It’s still risk if you mitigate it. It’s still risk if you hedge, create contingencies, and plan.
- 19. Risk and Accountability Our current ideologies of risk-taking and accountability are at odds. Risk-taking can only take place within a context of judgment that is opaque. A culture that values “boldness”, action-bias, or the appearance of certainty, usually destroys true risk-taking.
- 20. Boring bullet list of stuff we’re changing Logic changes in varnish if the request came from Fastly Moving Abra back to the client-side (yay Ken) Userinfo back to the client-side (can’t decrypt the session cookie..yet) Audit what www services we can cache in Fastly Connected CREAM to Fastly’s purge API ???????????????????? SO MANY THINGS
- 21. When are things happening 10/4-5 - First rounds of production tests (WWW) 10/09 - Testing during debate (WWW) 10/13-19 - Testing with Mobile Web (internally, public, debate) 10/25 - Production launch 11/08 - Hide somewhere and hope Trump doesn’t win 11/10’ish - back to datacenter if necessary (it wasn’t…)
- 22. Jon, Vinessa and Chase
- 27. Chartbeat
- 28. Yikes
- 30. Yikes.
- 31. To end: we are just getting started... What’s next: � Continuing to shrink provisioning � Continuing to “purge” or replace downstream caching � Logs into BigQuery � Looking at edge processing opportunities: ⛈ Load balancing, WAF ⛈ Image service ⛈ Auth & Meter
- 32. Thank You!