6. A disruption problem…
450,000
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
200+k more
digital subs
than print
Print circ
Digital subs
7. A disruption problem…
450,000
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
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
Print circ
Digital subs
subscriber consumption and 50% of total traffic
13. Understand data from the top…
We quickly came to realise that actually, the real
power of the subscription relationship …comes
from the data
John Ridding, CEO, Financial Times
Mature + successful
data driven CRM
programme
Measure cross-platform
effectiveness
Optimisation embedded
across digital business
Shapes our strategy
Powers on and off-site marketing
Provides insight into customer
content preferences
14. Our outcomes…
Delivered on time
To budget
Decrease in costs by 80%
Pay as you go with no upfront commitment
Flexibility to scale
Real-time data instead of reports
Not a black box Data Warehouse
15. 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!”
17. This is our outcome…
“This is Fantastic, guys!”
18. 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
19. 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.”
20. 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
21. 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
31. Controlling your environments…
Seamless AD integration
Make it easier to use than not to use
Using Roles & Least Privilege Principle
Simple security scales
32. 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…
33. 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
34. Automation…
Tidy up all the time
Build confidence you can reinstate
It’s cheaper than duplication…
35. 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…
36. Getting away from managing all the complexity…
Who knows how many disks
they will need next year?
37. What's going into the cloud?
Nearly everything…
But managing for Armageddon…
38. In summary…
Trying to keep it simple
Automation is key
Take the savings
Focus on business value