Discovery Communications using AWS

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon, that provides various services like computation power, database storage, content delivery services, and much more. The services provided by AWS are a mixture of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service).

AWS was dispatched in 2006 to deal with the online retail activities for Amazon.com. AWS was the main cloud specialist organization to offer pay-more only as costs arise model that scales according to the client's needs.

Presently AWS offers administrations in around 190 nations, possessing the worldwide market top of 31%, which is much more than any of its competitors. Indeed, even the administration associations, instructive associations, charities just as private associations are utilizing AWS.

Amazon offers more than 100 services depending on user's needs and the services can be found at aws.amazon.com

DISCOVERY AND AWS

Discovery evaluated different cloud arrangements, however, none offered the adaptability and valuing of Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AWS was the most mature offering available,” says Igor Brezac, Chief Systems Architect, Digital Media.

Discovery expected to redesign its site framework, yet needed to keep away from an exorbitant forthright one-time cost for refreshing their equipment. Updating would have set aside significant effort to achieve for a three-man group from Discovery Communications, between procuring the equipment, arranging it, and relocating information to the new framework. Discovery also had multiple delivery engines powering their websites and wanted to consolidate to make their infrastructure easier to manage. Moreover, the organization required an answer that would permit them the adaptability to pay for just what they utilized, and the capacity to scale rapidly to fulfill a need.

" We migrated more than 40 sites to AWS without missing a beat. We now host all our digital media on AWS. Using the AWS Cloud gives us great capacity to expand or shrink our infrastructure as business requirements change—we now have an easy way to re-architect any of our sites."

--Igor Brezac

Chief Systems Architect, Digital Media, Discovery Communications

These are the following AWS Resources use by Discovery Communication.

• Discovery Communications is running about 150 instances of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
• They use Amazon Elastic Block Service (Amazon EBS) storage.
• They use Amazon Machine Images (AMI) that are built with a custom version of Ubuntu.
• They use Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB) handles load balancing both externally and internally for Discovery, inside the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
• The company uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store static content and host a few websites.
• Discovery also uses Amazon Route 53 in combination with Amazon ELB for its domain name service.
• Discovery’s static assets are delivered globally by Amazon CloudFront’s distributed edge servers.

The use of multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ) has also played a role in Discovery’s success. “This is where Amazon ELB is vital to us,” Brezac continues. “If one Availability Zone is unavailable, Amazon ELB will send the traffic to the other data center. Amazon Multi-AZ is key to the entire deployment. Without that, we wouldn’t have the peace of mind that we do.”

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