With the digital media landscape in upheaval, NBC News takes nothing for granted. Early to mobile apps, it continually seeks the Next Big Thing with which to create “special experiences” for consumers. Its latest find: Notification Hubs in Windows Azure, with which it cost-effectively pushes millions of breaking-news notifications within minutes. Consumers love the app (4.5 out of 5 stars), and NBC shaved months off time-to-market.
Business Needs
“The market for digital news is ferocious.”
Andrew Locke doesn’t mince words. Locke, Vice President of Mobile and Devices for NBC News, deals with that ferocity on a daily basis, from competitors including other traditional media organizations (TV and print) that have moved to the web, news organizations existing solely as websites, and app-only competitors.
NBC News has done well in this increasingly competitive market because of its unique assets, according to Locke, which include strong broadcast and cablecast brands; properties such as Today, Meet the Press, and NBC Nightly News; and a spectrum of expertise (rather than a single focus on, say, politics).
The company was early to the mobile market, producing phone apps starting in 2008. Its strategy includes “being on every platform that has meaningful traction with our audience,” Locke says. The strategy also includes a very specific target audience: “dedicated news consumers, especially big fans of our existing brands,” says Locke. Casual news consumers will get to the NBC News website on their own, often through social media. But for its core audience, NBC News wants to create what Locke calls “a special experience based on the best features that each platform has to offer to our news fans.”
NBC News wants to get its apps, with their “special experiences,” on as many types of devices as possible. It saw cloud computing as an important way to do this, because back-end functionality could be created once, and exposed to all compatible devices connecting to the cloud.
But the company didn’t, as yet, have its apps in the cloud.
Solution
NBC News already had apps for Windows Phone 7, but the releases of the Windows 8 operating system and Windows Phone 8, in addition to the availability of Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud-computing platform, presented the company with new opportunities to deliver a “special experience” to its core audience.
One of those opportunities was a new way to push notifications. Push notifications are a traditional, even vital, part of mobile apps, and NBC News already used them. But NBC wanted the fastest push notifications possible, to deliver breaking news ahead of the competition. It wanted a cross-platform solution that would eliminate the need to write time-consuming code, and to repeat that task for each mobile platform. It wanted a solution that could manage itself and scale to millions of users without incurring high latency. It wanted all this at a practical cost. What it wanted was Windows Azure Notification Hubs.
The company first considered running a push notification system on Amazon Web Services but balked at the complicated workflow that would have been required, according to Adam Wyss, Senior Software Engineer at NBC News. Instead, Wyss and his colleagues used Windows Azure Notification Hubs. With the development work they needed already available in Notification Hubs and the Windows Azure worker role, the NBC News team established its notification capability and pushed out client software in two days.
On the client side, NBC News uses toast notifications and plans to adopt Windows Phone Live Tiles, which will display notifications of news stories in near real time. The notifications will appear directly on the start screen, where they can have more screen real estate than a toast notification, without being intrusive.
The company also uses Windows Azure to process NBC News-specific lock screens that users can choose for their mobile devices. And it adopted Windows Phone voice integration to give users another way to navigate easily through the app.
Benefits
NBC News used Windows Azure and Windows Phone to create a highly compelling app, bring it to market quickly, and use its notification technology across all major platforms.
Creates “Special Experience” for Core Audience
NBC News succeeded in its goal to create another “special experience” for its core audience.
“We want breaking news alerts to reach our millions of users as fast as possible,” says Locke. “That’s why we use Windows Azure. We want a strong, highly rated NBC News app to be the leading choice for digital news.”
Users apparently agree that the NBC News app is a success. It’s rated 4.5 stars out of 5.
Speeds Time-to-Market from Months to Days
By choosing Windows-based technologies, NBC News gained the streamlined development experience it wanted. Wyss estimates that if his team had written a highly automated notification system itself, the process would have taken months, instead of just two days.
“Windows Azure gives us a fast, easy development environment,” says Wyss. “Turnaround through Windows Azure is faster than we could achieve inside our existing infrastructure. That’s more cost effective, of course, but the even greater benefit is faster time-to-market. None of our competitors are standing still, and our ability to shave months off time-to-market is an important competitive advantage.”
Provides Support Across Operating Systems
NBC News developers saved even more time, while expanding the reach of the notification technology, by taking advantage of its cross-platform support. A single Notification Hub can support both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 without additional coding—in addition to support for iOS and Android.
“We were extremely productive by using the Windows Azure Notification Hubs,” says Wyss. “There was only one hub to create, and now we have only one hub to maintain for all these platforms. Our choice of Windows Azure is proving very successful.”
Molly Wardell, COO Wardell Builders, explains why they choose Managed Solution as their trusted technology partner in this customer testimonial. See more testimonials here: https://managedsolut.wpengine.com/testimonials/.
Wardell Builders is a team made up of dedicated professionals who all know the importance of creating value in a home. They have been building custom homes for decades and have been recognized for their attention to detail, quality results, clear communication and on-track progress. Wardell has won a range of both national and local awards from the National Custom Home Builder Award to the BIA Award for Customer Satisfaction.
Financial Organization Stays Compliant With Managed Solution
Business Needs: A small financial organization of twelve users contacted Managed Solution for technology consulting and recommendations to help move the company forward, while ensuring they stay compliant. During a recent audit, they were using Google Apps and did not pass regulatory compliance. They needed assistance from a technical partner to aid them off of Google aps and help them utilize a new business platform. Their current IT Manager also had several responsibilities at the financial organization and did not want to worry about daily IT issues. They needed a partner that provided technology recommendations to move the company forward and solutions scalable for company growth.
Solution: Managed Solution partnered with the financial organization by doing an assessment of their current technology structure and providing a full cloud solution that combined Office 365 and platinum level support. This includes remote monitoring, 24/7 help desk support, and unlimited onsite support that is scalable to grow with their organization. With understanding their business goals, Managed Solution provided a cost effective business continuity/disaster recovery solution and migrated users and data to Office 365.
Success: The solution provided by Managed Solution ensures the financial organization will meet regulatory compliance requirements during an audit. By moving to the cloud, the financial organization didn't need to purchase new on premise hardware, which reduced hardware infrastructure costs and provided an easy solution for growth. The fixed-cost model and 24/7 help desk and unlimited on-site support has increased employee productivity and helped them learn and leverage their technology tools. Now their current employees no longer have to mange their current IT issues, as Managed Solution is managing their infrastructure. The financial organization can focus on growing their business, instead of focusing on IT.
To reduce operating costs and find more effective ways to attract and retain customers in the hyper-competitive airline industry, United Airlines is working with Microsoft to expand private cloud computing to the enterprise. United Airlines uses Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Replica and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to expedite the migration and consolidation of virtual machines and mission critical services to its new data center in Chicago and provide high availability services when hardware fails.
“To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days. Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day.” Richard Wilson, Principle Architect United Airlines
Situation
Following its 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines is reaching new levels of customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company was rated the world’s most admired airline on Fortune magazine’s 2012 airline-industry list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.
Behind the accolades, the United IT team works to keep the underlying reservation system, baggage-handling system, public website, aircraft maintenance records, database servers, and countless other computer systems running flawlessly around the clock. It is hard work and it means that the IT team is constantly looking for ways to deliver new services faster and to streamline both its capital outlay on servers and the operational expenses involved in running them.
“The airline industry in incredibly competitive,” says Eric Craig, Managing Director of Enterprise Architecture at United Airlines. “We have the most comprehensive network on earth, but that’s not enough. We have to earn our customers’ business on each and every flight with the great on-time performance, excellent customer service, and innovative features our customers want. Our IT infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost effective, and highly adaptive so we can invest more capital into our customer facing products rather than data center servers.”
Early Virtualization Projects
In 2008, United made significant progress in building a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable IT infrastructure by virtualizing its data center infrastructure. Virtualization not only helped United to reduce IT costs but also to improve business agility—the ability to respond to business needs faster by deploying virtual machines in hours rather than weeks.
United even virtualized its business-critical United.com website and reservation system, which was running on physical servers. “United.com is an incredibly important channel for us,” Craig says. “Between 30 and 40 percent of the airline’s revenue comes from United.com—in excess of [US]$10 billion annually—so it needs to be running on a resilient, adaptive, and scalable infrastructure.”
At around the same time prior to the merger, Continental had virtualized about half of its Houston infrastructure, using the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server Datacenter operating system.
Merger Provides Incentive for Cloud Computing
Following the 2010 merger with Continental Airlines, United Airlines determined that the airline should continue along the virtualization path and adopt private cloud computing, which encompasses reliable, scalable, on-demand compute, storage, and networking services and offers point-and-click resource provisioning for business units and self-service provisioning for the software development organization.
“With the automated management capabilities of private cloud computing, we are responding to business needs to increase compute capabilities, or to improve performance to minutes instead of days,” Craig says. “The ability to move applications from one server to another without disrupting your business, or to roll back an installation when you deploy a product that didn’t quite work out—that kind of adaptability and manageability is a great cost reducer and business enabler. Private cloud computing is the only way to get from 50 servers per administrator to 1,000 servers per administrator.”
United.com IT staff wanted to ensure its infrastructure had the resilience, scalability, and manageability required to boost the airline’s competitive position in the aviation industry. The IT team also wanted to have high availability as a foundational feature of its new data center to minimize downtime for its business-critical systems.
“We can’t afford any service outages, so it was important to pick the right high availability and disaster recovery (DR) solution: resilient, flexible, easy-to-use, and cost-effective,” says Richard Wilson, Principle Architect, Microsoft Private Cloud and Windows Server at United Airlines. “Our existing manual failover scenarios and expensive storage arrays were from multiple vendors and they were complex to manage.”
At the same time, United wanted to consolidate its data centers. It decided to close its Houston, Texas-data center facility and it needed an efficient, automated method to migrate its virtualized Microsoft infrastructure in Houston to its new, more cost-effective data center in Chicago. Each of these scenarios would benefit from a cloud computing solution.
“To exploit the power of cloud computing, we needed a partner that offered more than just a powerful hypervisor,” says Wilson. “We also needed a comprehensive management tool that we could use to manage the cloud fabric, from the physical servers to the virtual machines, storage, and networking environments.”
Solution
United Airlines is using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, including Hyper-V virtualization technologies, as part of the technology stack for the private cloud. “Microsoft technologies are easy to work with, interoperable, flexible, and cost-effective,” says Wilson. “As such, we see the Microsoft private cloud as a strategic enabler to streamline our integration efforts, and as a way to reduce the cost and complexity of the merger.”
Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions serve critical roles in United’s private cloud strategy and work well with other management tools. “United Airlines is a large, technically heterogeneous and complicated enterprise. No one tool can provide everything we need,” says Craig. “System Center is an important component of our management stack, providing orchestration, provisioning, migration, and automated recovery services throughout a large portion of our IT landscape. Microsoft recognizes the management challenges of large enterprises and has ensured that System Center interoperates well with the rest of our tool stack.”
Working with Microsoft
Part of the decision to choose Microsoft technologies lies in the close working relationship that has developed between United and Microsoft. Before the merger, both Continental and United had participated in many Microsoft Rapid Deployment and Technology Adoption Programs. Post-merger, United joined the Technology Adoption Program for System Center 2012.
“This was a great opportunity to work with the product team and gain early access to the features, the ability to have input and shape what the product will look like, and to get features that we really needed,” says Wilson. “Over the last couple of years, we have been extremely happy with the support and knowledge of Microsoft Services Consulting, which has yielded some IT highlights post-merger.”
Migrating United.com to a Hyper-V Private Cloud Environment
One of these highlights is a joint Microsoft and United project to accomplish the migration of United.com to a Hyper-V private cloud environment. In March 2012, with the private cloud up and running, the United IT team pulled off what Craig calls “one of the most complicated, massive cutovers in transportation history”— which included moving the business-critical United.com website from a physical server environment to a Hyper-V cloud environment.
“We did continuous system testing prior to the cutover date—both scale and functionality testing,” Craig says. “We also worked with our business partners to ascertain all the scenarios that were likely to drive traffic patterns up or down during the migration.”
As the Microsoft and United team members were modeling those scenarios, they discovered that they didn’t have enough servers supporting United.com to respond to worst-case scenarios. They quickly solved this issue by taking advantage of automated build development.
“Just two or three days before this incredibly important event, we deployed enough Hyper-V virtual machines to support the site, and we did it in hours using automated server builds and application deployment,” says Craig. “Physical host builds used to take days to complete and a 30-page manual document. We reduced this to 2.5 hours with automation. We would not have been able to respond in such a short time without the private cloud technologies we had in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012.”
Building a Disaster Recovery Solution
To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”
Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.
Enabling Data Center Migrations
During the RDP, the IT team realized it could use Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery for the migration of virtual machines from Houston to Chicago. “We were excited by this unusual use-case scenario, which underlies the flexibility of Microsoft technologies,” says Wilson. “Being able to take advantage of these technologies to migrate services sets a DR solution from Microsoft apart from other solutions available in the market.”
In Houston, the IT team deployed servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 as a pre-migration environment and installed a 1-gigabit circuit between Houston and Chicago for the replications. “We’ll use Azure Site Recovery to initiate the failover so that the virtual machines will become live in Chicago,” says Wilson. “When we complete the Houston migration, we’ll use the same solution to replicate non-production systems from our data center in Charlotte, North Carolina, to our center in Chicago. Then, we plan on using Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery as a cost-effective DR infrastructure between our data centers.”
Benefits
United Airlines is using Microsoft virtualization technologies to streamline its integration efforts, reducing the resources required to consolidate its IT environment following the merger. At the same time, the company is creating an agile, responsive, cloud-based IT environment that will help build long-term adaptability and resilience in the highly competitive aviation industry.
Improves Business Agility, Customer Service
Even when it comes to the vagaries of the global airline system, United is using private cloud computing to accommodate fluctuations in site traffic on United.com and keep its customers happy. “The airline industry must respond to unpredictable global events in real time—natural disasters, security threats, changes in travel demand caused by other transportation sectors—all sorts of things will happen all over the earth that can send customers to our site, and we won’t be able to predict the traffic patterns,” says Craig. “We also have to accommodate predictable events, such as marketing campaigns or fare sales. The point is, we need to scale United.com quickly and dynamically. With System Center 2012, we can automatically match computing power to website traffic. That’s IT that truly supports the business.”
The key to winning sales and driving consumer loyalty is the ability to offer more competitive online services for customers. United Airlines intends to use System Center 2012 R2 in its development environment to improve business agility by reducing time-to-market and introducing competitive online services before other airlines. “What’s the duty of an infrastructure team to the rest of the business? It’s to provide a resilient, scalable, rich, flexible infrastructure so that when the business comes to you and says, ‘I want to implement a brand new application,’ you can roll out those new technologies quickly, easily, and cost-effectively,” Craig says.
Reduces IT Costs
United Airlines stands to save millions of dollars in data center costs through private cloud computing. Aiming for 100 percent reliability of United.com, the company used to buy more computing capacity than it needed to have capacity in reserve. However, availability through redundancy was expensive. With cloud computing, the cloud fabric flexes to absorb traffic bursts, and workloads move around the cloud dynamically to make maximum use of resources.
Cloud computing also lowers the cost of rolling out new services. “We had all these physical servers, and before we deployed anything new, we would take some of them out of service, deploy the new application on them, wait a couple of days to see if it was OK, and then bring the service online,” Craig says. “This was inefficient from a capital allocation perspective. We needed something less expensive and more dynamic. Using private cloud computing is a far smarter approach.”
The engineering team that is using System Center to develop applications for Microsoft SharePoint is saving labor, power, and rack space costs by building out the collaboration environment in the cloud. “To build an eight-node cluster in cooperation with the storage and networking teams used to take three to five days,” says Wilson. “Now the operations team can do it all themselves in a half-day. That’s just one small group; when this development approach spreads across the company, efficiencies and cost savings will increase exponentially.”
Supports Business Continuity
Deploying the latest business continuity solution is the airline’s most recent step forward in its cloud computing journey with Microsoft. United is using its new disaster recovery solution to achieve the following benefits:
Multipurpose solution provides extra value. While peace of mind is a significant benefit, a DR solution can represent a lot of IT resources sitting in readiness on the shelf. This is not the case with United today. “We’re using our Microsoft DR solution to expedite a key operational project—migrating our Hyper-V virtualized environment from Houston to Chicago—while reducing risk and management overhead,” says Wilson. “The faster we get our workloads to run in the more efficient Chicago facility, the faster we can start to reduce our data center overhead.”
Resilient disaster recovery reduces downtime. On-premises DR software is susceptible to the disasters that can hit a data center. But no matter what happens on the ground, United IT staff can always access their Azure Site Recovery panel through an Internet connection. “With Azure Site Recovery, we have an always available management panel to enact our DR plans as soon as possible, reducing downtime,” says Wilson.
Reduced costs. United had already shipped several sophisticated storage arrays to Houston to use for the replication, but now it can repurpose that investment for other purposes. “Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery will allow us to use lower-cost storage platforms and still get the resiliency we need. This solution will save us a lot of money,” says Wilson.
Simplified recovery orchestration reduces IT management. The IT team is confident that the new high availability and DR solution won’t be a drain on their time. “From what we have seen, this isn’t going to be a system that will be difficult to set up and support,” says Wilson.
Increased flexibility saves bandwidth. “With flexible replication intervals, we can reduce replication times for critical systems, such as reservations, and save bandwidth by allotting longer replication intervals to a system that isn’t used as frequently,” says Wilson. “We are excited to put our new solution from Microsoft into production.”
Concludes Craig, “Because our industry is so incredibly cost-sensitive, it’s essential that we’re getting every penny’s worth of value out of every IT asset we have in our enterprise. We can’t waste money on spare server capacity or data center costs. With a Microsoft private cloud solution, we are able to reduce our IT costs dramatically.”
Transform the data center
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the data center by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Microsoft Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.
Pinterest is no stranger to rapid growth, expanding from 50,000 users to 17 million in 9 months. Now at 48 million users, Pinterest was able to scale its business because it was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With a company of fewer than 12 employees, Pinterest didn’t want to dedicate staff time to managing a data center. Instead, Pinterest uses AWS to manage a high-performance social application that stores more than 8 billion objects and 400 terabytes of data in the AWS Cloud using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and 225,000 instance hours a month with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
About The State of Arizona
The State of Arizona consists of more than 130 federated government agencies and 32,000 employees, which serve more than 6 million residents. The organization decided to begin migrating its IT infrastructure to AWS after recognizing that more than half of its 2,600 servers were aging and needed to be replaced. During its first phase, the State of Arizona migrated its DNS solution to the AWS Cloud. By using AWS, the State now saves 75% in annual operating costs on its DNS solution when compared to its previous on-premises IT infrastructure.
The State of Arizona Runs its DNS Solution on AWS and Saves 75% Annually (3:31)
City IT Department Upgrades Infrastructure and Builds Successful Technology Roadmap
Industry: City/Municipality/Government
Business Needs:
A city in San Diego County with more than 1200 employees finally received the budget to improve their IT infrastructure. The city needed to upgrade over 600 Windows XP desktops that were no longer supported because they presented a security risk. They wanted to migrate to a cloud-based solution for email and were evaluating Microsoft Office 365 to improve employees productivity and increase collaboration. The organization also needed to migrate over 60 servers that were running on Windows server 2003 which Microsoft ended support in July, 2015. The city needed to focus on implementing new and innovative ideas to move the business forward, not worry about if their infrastructure was running properly or presented a security risk.
Solution:
Managed Solution partnered with the city's IT department to assess their overall network and provide a detailed IT roadmap. Managed Solution provided a GAP analysis for the IT department with the results showing how the city stacks up against contemporary IT services given their size and complexity of operations. Managed Solution addressed security concerns by making sure the environment was up to date, effective and not obtrusive into productivity. We also analyzed the city's network infrastructure ensuring they had the appropriate bandwidth to run cloud-based applications. Managed Solution recommended to virtualize more of their servers and move beyond virtualization to a private and public cloud environment. The hybrid cloud environment provided a solution for some applications to run on-premises in a Microsoft-based private cloud environment and others to run in Windows Azure. Delivering IT as a Service provided the city with a solution that was able to upgrade their IT infrastructure with reliable services. Managed Solution implemented this strategy by performing a thorough network assessment of their existing infrastructure and understanding the city’s business objectives.
Success:
Assessing the city’s network allowed Managed Solution to provide a detailed and comprehensive IT roadmap. The city was able to identify a migration strategy to reduce security risks, retire old infrastructure, and improve employees productivity and end-user experience. The roadmap better supports business growth and provides strategies to standardize, virtualize, and cloud-enabled its IT assets. The technology roadmap is allowing the city to focus on using technology for better operational inefficiencies while improving productivity and reducing IT troubleshooting.
Case Study: Airbnb Scales Infrastructure Automatically Using AWS
About Airbnb
Airbnb is a community marketplace that allows property owners and travelers to connect with each other for the purpose of renting unique vacation spaces around the world. The Airbnb community users’ activities are conducted on the company’s Website and through its iPhone and Android applications. The San Francisco-based Airbnb began operation in 2008 and currently has hundreds of employees across the globe supporting property rentals in nearly 25,000 cities in 192 countries.
The Challenge
A year after Airbnb launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of service administration challenges experienced with its original provider. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-founder & CTO of Airbnb says, “Initially, the appeal of AWS was the ease of managing and customizing the stack. It was great to be able to ramp up more servers without having to contact anyone and without having minimum usage commitments. As our company continued to grow, so did our reliance on the AWS cloud and now, we’ve adopted almost all of the features AWS provides. AWS is the easy answer for any Internet business that wants to scale to the next level.”
Why Amazon Web Services
Airbnb has grown significantly over the last 3 years. To support demand, the company uses 200 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for its application, memcache, and search servers. Within Amazon EC2, Airbnb is using Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically distributes incoming traffic between multiple Amazon EC2 instances. To easily process and analyze 50 Gigabytes of data daily, Airbnb uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Airbnb is also using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to house backups and static files, including 10 terabytes of user pictures. To monitor all of its server resources, Airbnb uses Amazon CloudWatch, which allows the company to easily supervise all of its Amazon EC2 assets through the AWS Management Console, Command Line Tools, or a Web services API.
In addition, Airbnb moved its main MySQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Airbnb chose Amazon RDS because it simplifies much of the time-consuming administrative tasks typically associated with databases. Amazon RDS allows difficult procedures, such as replication and scaling, to be completed with a basic API call or through the AWS Management Console. Airbnb currently uses Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployment to further automate its database replication and augment data durability.
Airbnb was able to complete its entire database migration to Amazon RDS with only 15 minutes of downtime. This quick transition was very important to the fast-growing Airbnb because it did not want its community of users to be shut out of its marketplace for an extended period of time. Tobi Knaup, an engineer at Airbnb says, “Because of AWS, there has always been an easy answer (in terms of time required and cost) to scale our site.”
The Benefits
Airbnb believes that AWS saved it the expense of at least one operations position. Additionally, the company states that the flexibility and responsiveness of AWS is helping it to prepare for more growth. Knaup says, “We’ve seen that Amazon Web Services listens to customers’ needs. If the feature does not yet exist, it probably will in a matter of months. The low cost and simplicity of its services made it a no-brainer to switch to the AWS cloud.”
With the digital media landscape in upheaval, NBC News takes nothing for granted. Early to mobile apps, it continually seeks the Next Big Thing with which to create “special experiences” for consumers. Its latest find: Notification Hubs in Windows Azure, with which it cost-effectively pushes millions of breaking-news notifications within minutes. Consumers love the app (4.5 out of 5 stars), and NBC shaved months off time-to-market.
