American Press Institute (API) is a non profit organization that works to advance and innovate the news industry through research, training, and tool-creation. They had created an advanced online analytics and reporting system called Metrics for News, which provided media companies with insight into which stories brought the most readers. The product was extremely successful, and demand was outpacing their existing infrastructure. This posed potential problems in the future with scaling popularizing the service to larger customers and greater volume of users.
American Press Institute
Helping a leader in the news industry scale their product suite to match increasing demand.
The Story
Technology: AWS: RDS Mysql, Elastic Beanstalk, EFS, DynamoDB, Cloudwatch, Lambda; PHP, MySql
Taking Aim
Our first step in understanding how to address API’s need for scalable performance and reliability was to analyze both the underlying code of the Metrics for News platform and the infrastructure. Quickly we realized API could greatly benefit from moving away from static web and database servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a more cloud-first architecture. We got to work migrating their platform to AWS, adjusting architecture and development methodologies along the way.
Objectives
- Migrate the platform to AWS
- Remove file system dependencies to scalable cloud based storage services
- Automate deployment processes for faster more reliable release cycles
- Enhance security practices
- Combine multiple code repositories into a single GitLab repository
- Alter underlying code to allow for platform scalability
Hitting The Target
The American Press Institute Metrics for News platform has been moved to AWS and performance has increased dramatically. The platform now enjoys better reliability, redundancy, and is set to scale with minimal additional intervention. Security has been kept inline within best practices. Developers have an easier time as well, working from a single code repository. This lets them deploy the platform with a single click, allowing API to quickly release updates and enhancements.
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User volume handled
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Click to deploy new releases
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Servers configured to balance load and auto-scale
“Our Metrics for News platform has never worked better. It now performs without issue for our largest customer and allows us to continue to grow without worrying if the platform can handle it. They also helped our development process; now that we’re on AWS, we can work faster and deploy code quicker than ever before. We can’t thank Slingshot enough for walking us through the process and giving us a great update to our system.”
Jeff SondermanDeputy Executive Director and EVP