Cloud Transformation

The Challenge

The Seattle Times started to migrate seattletimes.com to AWS in August 2015. Their accelerated deployment and migration to AWS brought upon a new challenge: they moved to the cloud but needed help optimizing and transforming their cloud environment. They needed a layered security model and automated deployments for their application stack.

The Seattle Times’ goals were to: (1) transform their cloud environment to become cloud-native, (2) increase security of the core AWS services and layers through full use of the AWS security feature set, (3) use automation throughout their stack, and (4) reduce costs.

Additionally, by leveraging services like Lambda and API Gateway, the Seattle Times made better use of their existing computing budget for future innovation on the AWS platform.

Why Amazon Web Services

The Seattle Times has started to leverage additional AWS services like Lambda for image resizing and are investigating API Gateway and other AWS services. They originally selected the AWS platform for the value added by autoscaling and the elastic nature of AWS. Because the seattletimes.com workload is very spiky in nature, the team at The Seattle Times felt AWS was a preferred platform when they were evaluating other cloud service providers.

“It is my hope that we will be able to engage with 1Strategy in the future, both for training purposes but also for future product initiatives,” said Anita Nesbitt, Software Engineering Manager, The Seattle Times. “Indeed, I’m confident that CEO Rich Uhl and 1Strategy will continue to be a valued partner to both Amazon Web Services and The Seattle Times.”

Solution and Benefits: Turning to 1Strategy

The Seattle Times’ rapid pace of adoption so early in their journey to the Amazon cloud led them to 1Strategy. Once they had migrated, they recognized that they were not running in a cost-optimized way, and needed help transforming their processes to take advantage of the AWS ecosystem. 1Strategy helped The Seattle Times in their cost-optimization efforts by showing them a more economical approach while eliminating unneeded costs. At the same time, 1Strategy codified their manual processes, enforcing compliance dynamically and at scale. In the first hour with 1Strategy, they were able to identify cost reductions of over 15%.

1Strategy built CloudFormation templates to automate the creation of VPCs, subnets, Security Groups, ELBs, and Autoscaling groups. These templates combined with the efforts of the DevOps lead are enhancing the security and automation of their platform, moving them towards their goal of blue/green deployments.

“1Strategy has helped us greatly improve our security and deployment positions on AWS. They helped us to quickly distill and codify the various loose ends remaining after cloud launch of seattletimes.com,” said Jesse Lee, DevOps Engineer at The Seattle Times.

Additional cost savings were identified and implemented by 1Strategy, as well. They worked to determine the right instance types to right-size The Seattle Times’ infrastructure and adjusted their auto-scaling policies to be more efficient. The team then automated the starting and stopping of non-production resources during off hours. These efforts resulted in a 15% monthly cost savings since engaging with 1Strategy.