The challenge

Nikkei Asia is an award-winning news website and part of the Financial Times group of publications, providing political, economic, business and international affairs coverage to a worldwide subscriber base. Bluetel has partnered with its in-house product team since 2017, streamlining editorial processes and boosting subscription growth. Historically designed as a Platform as a Service solution, legacy architecture was posing a number of challenges, namely site reliability, deployment downtime and an inability to adapt to fluctuations in user demand.

The response

Our solution involved a re-platforming initiative with four clear goals:

Zero downtime, negating the need for the website to enter a maintenance mode during every deployment.
Full scalability, overcoming the inability of the existing system to do so
Improved reliability, optimising uptime and disaster recovery, while mitigating against component failure
Cost control, eliminating unnecessary expense through more efficient scaling.

Given the issues it faced and the changes it wanted to effect, it was clear that Nikkei Asia would need to transition to a customised, cloud-based infrastructure.Bluetel was pivotal to the transformation process, designing a bespoke system architecture tailored to the specific hosting needs of the existing Content Management System.

Owing to its ability to support reliable, scalable and cost-effective applications, we recommended that all components be managed using infrastructure as code (IaC) via AWS CDK. The combined use of AWS Savings Plans and Spot instances helped deliver significant cost reductions.

The outcome

With AWS CodeDeploy enabling blue/green deployments, new web features can now be released rapidly and confidently, with no downtime.

The system now auto scales horizontally to accommodate fluctuations in site demand. Using a range of metrics, we can now respond swiftly to traffic spikes while ensuring stable performance for Nikkei Asia’s editorial teams.

By accurately sizing infrastructure components and conducting pre-benchmarking with production traffic, it now runs in a High Availability Multi-AZ configuration. Leveraging AWS Managed Services has significantly reduced the maintenance overhead of the platform.

We’ve also been able to reduce hosting costs by 40% compared to the previous PaaS solution, while also delivering more precisely targeted computing resources.

The boost

Recognising the need for – and understanding the benefits of – engineering a fully tailored platform was pivotal to this project’s success. In doing so, we’ve put Nikkei Asia back in control of its system architecture and delivered on all of its key objectives.