Going Cloud First at the FT

Going cloud first at the FT

John O’Donovan CTO, Financial Times

@jodbod

Why cloud…

Going to talk about our approach

Finding our key project – The data Warehouse

Going cloud first

Finding balance…

For us getting to this point has been about finding balance…

Some FT Perspective

A disruption problem…

0 50,000

100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000

Q3 2010

Q4 2010

Q1 2011

Q2 2011

Q3 2011

Q4 2011

Q1 2012

Q2 2012

Q3 2012

Q4 2012

Q1 2013

Q2 2013

Q3 2013

Print circ

A disruption problem…

0 50,000

100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000

Print circ Digital subs

200+k more digital subs than print

A disruption problem…

0 50,000

100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000

Print circ Digital subs

200+k more digital subs than print

Total circulation grew 11% year-on-year to 677,000 (Deloitte assured, Q1 2014).

Online subscribers increasing 32% year-on-year to 435,000.

Digital readers represent two-thirds of total audience.

Mobile readership continues to increase, driving majority of subscriber consumption and 50% of total traffic

How people use content is changing…

How we measure content changes…

And platforms keep changing…

And platforms keep changing…

Some Redshift Points

We quickly came to realise that actually, the real power of the subscription relationship …comes from the data

John Ridding, CEO, Financial Times

Understand data from the top…

Mature + successful data driven CRM

programme

Optimisation embedded across digital business

Measure cross-platform effectiveness

Shapes our strategy

Powers on and off-site marketing

Provides insight into customer content preferences

Our outcomes…

Delivered on timeTo budget

Decrease in costs by 80%Pay as you go with no upfront commitment

Flexibility to scaleReal-time data instead of reportsNot a black box Data Warehouse

Analyst quote…

“As an analyst I generate a usage trend for  specific content over 4 months. This meant I had to create 4

individual data sets, one for each month. In the current system it took me 25-30 minutes to run the query for generating a data set for a single month.

When I migrated to Redshift I was able to run the query for all four months in about 2.5 minutes! This is a big win both for the business and the

analytics team.  98% reduction in processing time or 40 times faster!”

This is our outcome…

“blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

 98% reduction in processing time or 40 times faster!”

This is our outcome…

“This is Fantastic, guys!”

Securing the cloud…

Data security at network and application layers

Everything is encrypted and transported over https or ssh

Redshift runs mandatory SSL on client connections

Roles and privileges work in a controlled environment

Making it easier to stay in the “system”…

“Today the Data Science team had a problem that would take 300 hours to solve on their local

laptops so we created a Windows box in AWS that they could log on to, install R and crunch

through their problem overnight.”

Automation again…

Use Puppet to deploy from Stash

So it's not possible to merge an invalid job

Or deploy random “data munging” scripts

Confidence that what's in Stash is what’s in Prod

Tidy up! Data Debt is one of the worst kinds of Technical Debt

Automation…

Destroy and create environments easily

Don’t need a Test environment all the time, for eg.

With Puppet we could recreate the Linux environment

FT Platform installs monitoring & Splunk logging

Some General Points

FT Platform…

Our environment is complex

So it’s not a free for all

FT Platform is our interface

FT Platform…

FT Platform…

DevOps

FT Platform

FT Platform…

FT Platform…

FT Platform…all these things…

FT Platform…to all these places…

Remove the FEAR!!!!!

Controlling your environments…

Seamless AD integration

Make it easier to use than not to use

Using Roles & Least Privilege Principle

Simple security scales

Chaos Snail…coming to get you eventually…

All Hail the Chaos Snail

Based on Chaos Monkey but it’s more chilled Slows things down and attacks IO

Written in shell…

-  Bash to be precise…

-  Seemed like a good idea at the time…

Reboot, reboot, reboot…

No one should be proud of this anymore…

We reboot at least monthly

Breeds confidence, changes are easier

HeartBlead & ShellShock patching was easy

Automation…

Tidy up all the time

Build confidence you can reinstate

It’s cheaper than duplication…

Meet Tagbot…

Tagging environments and the Tagbot

AWS provides lots of services to help monitor

Work out how to control your spend

Don’t need all the sweets in the sweet shop…

Getting away from managing all the complexity…

Who knows how many disks they will need next year?

What's going into the cloud?

Nearly everything…

But managing for Armageddon…

In summary…

Trying to keep it simple

Automation is key

Take the savings

Focus on business value

Please note that this is a PowerPoint 2003 (ppt or pot) file. DO NOT work on or save this file on PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 as this will CORRUPT some slide master settings (even in the compatibility mode!!)

John O’Donovan @jodbod

www.ft.com

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