Fall trade show and conference season is in full swing, and in keeping with that tradition we’re here in Austin, Texas this week enjoying Pivotal’s SpringOne Platform conference.
Our Vice President of Alliances, Rob Anderson, spoke about our modernization work for The New York Times, a transformational journey of its Home Delivery Platform from legacy COBOL to Java to Amazon Web Services’ Cloud.
Rob delivered the success story to a packed house at Pivotal’s Lightning Talk at the Community Hub Monday evening. The Lightning Talk format makes for a fun talk, with only five minutes of content, driven by 20 slides, with each slide auto-advancing every 15 seconds.
Here’s a recap of The New York Times modernization journey, and be sure to check out the full five-minute video on YouTube by clicking here.
The New York Times’ core-business application has managed daily home delivery of the newspaper since 1979, supporting a line of business worth an astounding US$500 million+ annually. It represented many years of accumulated experience and knowledge, and yet it significantly resisted modification and evolution and needed to be brought into the modern world.
We managed and executed the automated refactoring of New York Times’ Home Delivery application, which consisted of twomillion lines of COBOL code, 600+ Batch Jobs, 3,500 files per day; and consumed three TB of hot data.
The transformation of this application was a multi-year journey, and ultimately a project that paid off for the 168-year-old media giant. It enabled the organization to reduce costs by 70 per cent, in addition to future-proofing the business. With thiscomplex modernization work behind it, the New York Times is positioned to benefit from additional improvements such as:
- Breaking down the application monolith into microservices
- Continued convergence of the digital subscription platform capabilities, including payments, product catalogue, customer accounts and financial accounting
- Developing new Java-based services alongside the converted code
- Easy access to business data
- Increasing the use of Cloud-native technologies and AWS managed services
AWS Backup for Amazon EFS volumes.
