The media business is one of the original sectors impacted by digital transformation. From the Internet revolution in the ‘90s that saw the first online newspapers through to today, the media business has seen continuous unremitting change.
Helping our customers from the onset of a revolution
The media business is one of the original sectors impacted by digital transformation. From the Internet revolution in the ‘90s that saw the first online newspapers through to today, the media business has seen continuous unremitting change. Some of these challenges have been self-inflicted, like free online content, while other has been brought on by the need to protect produced content, the hunt for online readers, and the need to seek new business models to shore up lower revenues from falling circulation numbers of printed copies. Most of these transformations has either driven innovation, or been totally dependent on innovation in the IT business.
In the early years, online newspapers were “the black sheep” in many media companies. Journalists could reserve their articles from being published online, obviously resulting in a quality gap between what was available in print and online. Why should anyone give away their work? Why should something that had always been bought all of a sudden be given away for free? Online editors fought continuously for acceptance of their platform, and content to their publications.
With the number of readers increasing exponentially, ad revenues followed. Uptime became not only a competitive advantage but also critical to ensure ad impressions. These challenges are easy to relate to, imagine the number of seconds it takes before you leave an unresponsive online newspaper? 5 seconds? 10 seconds? I think most of us will have left for a competing site within 10 seconds. Recognizing this, many media companies decided to focus on journalism while outsourcing IT operations of their online papers. And at this point, Redpill Linpro started delivering managed services to the Media business.
For us, as an open source company, it was naturally to combine the best parts of open source software to deliver responsive and fast sites with great uptime. All the online newspapers we manage run on Linux. Most of our infrastructure runs on or is built with Open Source components. If we find a bug in any part of these components, every line of code is ours to inspect. With fewer black boxes, we avoid the “follow the sun” support model. We can patch, submit and get the site back online.
How Media manage performance problems
As the complexity and amount of content on webpages grew, the online sites started experiencing performance problems. In 2005, the largest online newspaper in Norway, VG Nett, reached over 45 million page views every week, half of these on the front page. Twelve servers were needed in the front layer alone in order to handle the incoming requests.
But was that the only solution?
Anders Berg, a system administrator at VG, believed that there must be a way to reduce the number of servers needed and to load the pages faster. He wrote a spec on which Varnish Cache, a popular web accelerator, is based, we at Redpill Linpro helped implementing it, and today Varnish Cache is key to delivering performance of more than 2 million websites, including many of the world’s most demanding sites as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times.
In later years, Media has faced other challenges when it comes to distribution of content. Where there used to be a divide between printed media business and broadcast business, original print media companies now also produce and broadcast TV channels over the Internet. And large TV channels have established online news sites who are in fact competing with traditional newspapers. Launching a TV channel as a traditional newspaper brings up a whole new set of challenges, so when it comes to the technology - it just has to manage. And scale. And in a myriad of solutions, as a technology partner, it might be a good idea to offer some relief within the area of testing integration and performance.
Globalization of the media industry – challenge and opportunity
Another recent challenge in Media is the globalization of the entire media industry. End users now have all the online papers in the world to choose from, and of course, media companies face new challenges and competition through content produced in the blog sphere and shared through social media. Luckily, globalization also produces opportunities. One of our media customers’ niche business sites found a growing number of Asian based readers. This gave a subsequent challenge of latency driven performance issues on the site. Together we found a solution where Redpill Linpro built a CDN for the Asian marked, providing both great performance and the opportunity of continued growth for this customer.
Development in database engines have now enabled multi-master setups where multiple databases can be written to concurrently. Similarly, the any cast routing methodology lets a site announce its presence in several locations. This enables us to build highly redundant setups, giving our customers a higher fault tolerance and uptime. Together with one of our largest Media customers, we have through these technologies built sites distributed over several data centres. Their installation now serves readers concurrently and in parallel from three data centers where traffic is routed to the datacenter closest to the reader, giving redundancy and an even better experience for end users. As far as we know, this solution is unprecedented in the region.
Devops shortens time to market
Media has through their entire online history, due to tough competition and efficiency focus, had a need for short time to market. Through the digital transformation, many sectors are and will be experiencing the same challenge. One way to shorten the time spent on deployment is to break down the barriers between development and operations.
“Devops” can be defined as the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire software lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support. Devops is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work. This has derived into “agile system administration” or “agile opertions”; it sprang from applying newer Agile and Lean approaches to the business of operations.
Due to our long history with media businesses, and their needs for short time to market, it has been necessary for us at Redpill Linpro to practice Devops for a good number of years already. In fact, we see that we are at our best when our operations engineers can work closely with our customer's developers. Devops requires a foundation of mutual respect and trust. Once established, both operations and development engineers work together to solve common challenges in a far more efficient way.
As most of us, developers love to have their work day facilitated and improved. Whether we create and configure lightweight, reproducible and portable development environments or facilitate the use of containers, we bridge the traditional gap for deployment. Developers and operations engineers who get used to chat on a daily basis, ensure quality on a new level. And last but not least; in a world where speed is the key to success, we can shorten time to market to a minimum through a “Deploy whenever” principle.
A digital safe haven
After the whistleblowing sites like Wikileaks, and more recently the “Panama Papers” leak, the topic of creating a "safe haven" for whistleblowers and others that wish to submit anonymous tips to media has gained more traction. One of Redpill Linpro's media/newspaper customers recently asked us if we would be willing and able to set up a safe drop box for anonymous submissions.
From the technical side, the request is both exciting and challenging: We will need to design a solution that's as secure as possible while retaining the least possible amount of information, which means that we will need full control but with a minimum of logging and monitoring. Such a solution should be deployed outside of our regular customer networks, for the security of all parties. There are also other concerns, including legal: What if others - including law enforcement -
want access to the drop box?
While designing such a solution completely from scratch would be a useful exercise, out-of-the-box solutions are available. One of these is SecureDrop, managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, described as “an Open Source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources”. SecureDrop provides ready made configurations, installation instructions, and guidelines for how to implement a secure submission system. With trust and close cooperation with our customers, our experience of using and contributing to Open Source systems allows us to design and implement such systems fast and securely.
And finally – how to pick the best tech partner with whom you want to face digital transformation
- Look for someone who will take your challenges seriously, understand them and grow with them.
- Find a partner who is flexible and dedicated.
- It's not critical to have solved the exact same challenge before, but being good at problem solving goes a long way.
- Someone likes challenges, others don't. Stick to the first.
