AWS Summit: DynamoDB Powers The Times’ Paywall

News International CIO Chris Taylor told the AWS Summit in London today of his firm plans to shift all his company’s physical infrastructure into the cloud – and that Amazon’s DynamoDB database runs the access control system for the “paywall” NI has applied to content of The Times.

Taylor took the stage during a keynote by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, to tell the audience that a commitment to AWS cloud offerings had enabled the company to move from a newspaper firm to a multimedia giant: “Three years ago News International was a great newspaper company and the board realised that wasn’t good enough for the 21st century. We had to become a great multimedia company,” he said.

Times paywall uses Amazon

The change shifted a lot of the company’s infrastructure onto the web, and moved Taylor’s department upstairs, “from the basement to the board room”.

News International is not buying any new physical servers, and now has about 25 percent of its IT in the cloud, but that is set to increase to 75 percent in the next two years.

The first step was virtualising – NI’s IT is now 90 pecent virtualised (on about 600 virtual machines). “We will get to 100 percent after the last few old applications are retired,” he told the summit.

The next step is to put it all up on the cloud. “For something to be truly cloud, it has to have commodity pricing and be pretty much infinitely scalable,” he said. NI has avoided anything which would lock it in, or require it to install on-premises system, he added.

The cloud has enabled the famous NI paywall, which surrounds content on The Times, and requires users to register and pay to read content. “We don’t talk about a paywall – we prefer to say ‘content worth paying for’,” said Taylor.

The secret of the paywall is its granularity, he explained. It applies access control in specific ways to individual pieces of content – so registered users can share some things, and entice other readers through the barrier.

“To do that we had to build a powerful access control system,” he said. Amazon let NI use DynamoDB early before it was on general release – the NI ran one of the first two DynamoDB applications, and it now handles 45 million transactions every month, on just two mid-size EC2 server instances.  Importantly, it has a 40ms transaction time, so registered users don’t have to wait to read stories.

Although Taylor claims AWS doesn’t lock him in, NI’s technology future is pretty closely tied to the service. “The relationship with Amazon goes pretty deep,” he said. “Without question everything goes with Amazon.”

Part of the attraction is that Amazon lets him into new stuff like DynamoDB: “Amazon are not in the world of the big last minute reveal. They let customers in early.”

The next steps will involve working with SAP to get more of NI’s critical software migrated into the cloud, he said.

He also wants to see the 250-year archive of The Times online and searchable: “It is a massive resource. The majority is digitised, but it is difficult to access and manipulate it in a digital way.”

And he wants the cloud to suffuse the news company, including its journalists: “If we are selling subscriptions on the iPad our journalists need to be using iPads. If we want readers to follow us on Twitter, our journalists need to be all over Twitter.”

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