7 ms·

BBC Online Moves to AWS, Serverless

44 points by the_arun 6y ago

damagednoob 6y ago
I think this is a cross-post of the medium article. Previous discussion on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601
hactually 6y ago
I'd love to see the architecture for this... Tho, I did hear they now have 200 lambdas a second firing to serve the content. That seems incorrect based on the efforts on the caching layer. Anyone else know more?
- qz2 6y ago
  That's probably a very tiny fraction of their request footprint so it doesn't surprise me.
  - k__ 6y ago
    This. If you only got 100-1000 users, then 200 Lambdas per second is much. But if you got millions of users, it's not.
- willemlabu 6y ago
  From the article: > About 2,000 lambdas run every second to create the BBC website; a number that we expect to grow.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  I sort of wonder why it isn't a content workflow in the background that triggers (say) a push to Fastly or Cloudflare to update a subset of cached content. Or maybe it is that, and that still takes 200 lambdas/sec.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
villgax 6y ago
And cue the vendor lock-in blogs from the future
anakaine 6y ago
The thing that kills me with this, is that it must be such a pain in the backside to build, scale, and manage. I'd love to make use of these technologies, and I work for a suitably large organisation - but I'm not a one man army and this requires a serious team with some serious depth to it, invested time and remuneration overheads. How do I handle users, roles, permissions, application logic, database, forms, content, publishing, etc? Wordpress. It may not be in vogue, but its all there and I can deploy it pretty quick. Is there a solution I can pick up that will run as a static site, make use of serverless, and not take forever to build out?
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  Investigate JAMStack.
  - anakaine 6y ago
    Initial investigation reveals that this is just an index of static site generators and management interfaces that don't really address the points I raised.
- prox 6y ago
  There are some cms solutions up and coming that build on that kind of infrastructure, but I’ve seen nothing yet that can compete (for small teams) with Wordpress.
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  BTW wordpress can be used as a headless CMS. Your content creators use the wordpress interface and then you use it to build your static site from there. How much this is actually better than just using wordpress with cloudflare plugin, I don't know.
  - anakaine 6y ago
    Yeah. Most CDNs and caching plugins deliver a substantially similar result in that regard I suspect. My sites rely a great deal on granular group permissions and contextual display of accessible items. Gut feel is id be coding for days to replicate tick box functionality.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Not to knock Amazon here, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a publically funded British institution running on American-owned servers. I known we live in a Globalist world now, and even if the BBC ran their own servers it would probably be running on American produced hardware (Dell)... What do people think? Am I worrying about nothing?
- louwrentius 6y ago
  I can relate to this sentiment. I would rather have seen they host it physically within the borders of the country, with a 'good' local hosting/cloud provider. The added cost is the cost of that kind of 'security'.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    It's probably hosted in AWS' London region, so at least geographically it's within the borders of the country.
    - mshook 6y ago
      CLOUD Act makes that completely moot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
      - oyashirochama 6y ago
        The UK can do the same depending on situation to the US, granted the US can just ignore it if they really want to. Most modern countries have backdoor privacy systems, 5 eyes was literally designed for it since they can't spy on their own citizens, they have a group from another allied country do it and give them the info.
      - namdnay 6y ago
abhishektwr 6y ago
I never understood why media companies continue to reinvent the wheel. What’s commercial benefits if at all any? I guess, good for everyone’s CV. Build better media products, but no let’s build another publishing system.
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  What publishing system would you suggest, the BBC could use?
  - abhishektwr 6y ago
    I am unable to suggest anything as I am out of touch these days. 5 years back every media CIO/CTO wanted to have Adobe AEM paired with Wordpress. Then they realised Adobe AEM is way too costly so decided to build authoring experience in-house but still using Wordpress and like for rendering and delivery. Recent trend use JAMStack/SSR for rendering. Don’t get me wrong it’s all great but doesn’t solve real problem media businesses face these days.
- underwater 6y ago
  I don't thing there is a mature, flexible CMS out there for publishers. AEM is more appropriate for marketing and old school web pages. Doesn't work for long lived content, journalism or publishing to diverse platforms and formats (AMP, native)
- tiew9Vii 6y ago
  > What's commercial benefits if at all any? That's the brilliant thing about the BBC. None, and it does not matter. It's a publicly funded organization. They cannot make money by law (excluding BBC World). Any organisation as large as the BBC design their online media around making users buy more products. UX, a/b testing, research, all about making you buy something even if you didn't want to buy it. If the website isn't trying to sell you something, it's trying to collect your information to sell or provide others opportunities to sell to you. For the BBC you have none of that. That means everyone working at the BBC is working on providing the best user experience and content where you freely choose to visit because of the quality and content. Even if you don't like the content, critique the site, disagree or find faults with it, that doesn't change the fact the people creating it believe it's the best experience for a user. I've yet to work anywhere with all development being driven by UX and the UX member being one of the most respected people on the team. Their metric for success is visitors happiness, not profit from sales. They are also on tighter budgets, a political target, and legally can't compete with other commercial organisations. That means they can't always do things as well as they can do as some company will complain they are stealing their customers. That's why IPlayer has stagnated as an example. While their current lambda rendering wouldn't be something I'd personally do or recommend, it's also likely not CV building. The BBC is a billion pound, large, corporate organisation. Change is hard, deviating from the norm is hard, sometimes the process can make it hard to get things done. So ending up where they are now was probably a gradual process of trialing things over the years, capabilities of staff skills, and so on. The BBC has many faults but the lack of "What's commercial benefit" makes for doing fantastic work. It was the only meaningful work I've done in my career so far.
dwardu 6y ago
Good, they need it especially with #DefundTheBBC going on
acruns 6y ago
Mostly off topic but as an american, I much prefer the calmer way news casters in the UK speak when delivering the news over the overly dramatic, exaggerated, weird tone that is used in the US.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  As a Brit, I agree. It makes the news show feel less like serious reporting, and more like a televised tabloid, bereft of sincerity. Journalism isn't meant to be an exercise in theatre. edit Thinking about it, the term news show relates back to my point about theatre. Perhaps I should try to use news programme instead. From a quick search, the BBC use both terms.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Just avoid some of the newspapers, lol.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
See also yesterday's thread, Moving BBC Online to the Cloud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 edit I see damagednoob got there first. edit 2: Looking at the before-and-after screenshots near the end of the post, it doesn't strike me as an obvious UI improvement. They've slightly shrunk the featured photo, they've reduced the contrast of the caption, and have made less efficient use of the available screen space, so that the top 3 lines of the article are no longer visible when it first loads.
robertlagrant 6y ago
If it were me, Kubernetes with Kubeless, so you can switch vendor or self-host relatively easily.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
The BBC has been using AWS for quite some time, although, obviously, not for everything as this article shows.
SkyLinx 6y ago
A more portable environment would have been Kubernetes with one of the several server less solutions for it.

44 points by the_arun 6y ago

I think this is a cross-post of the medium article. Previous discussion on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601

hactually 6y ago

I'd love to see the architecture for this... Tho, I did hear they now have 200 lambdas a second firing to serve the content. That seems incorrect based on the efforts on the caching layer. Anyone else know more?

qz2 6y ago
That's probably a very tiny fraction of their request footprint so it doesn't surprise me.
- k__ 6y ago
  This. If you only got 100-1000 users, then 200 Lambdas per second is much. But if you got millions of users, it's not.
willemlabu 6y ago
From the article: > About 2,000 lambdas run every second to create the BBC website; a number that we expect to grow.
robertlagrant 6y ago
I sort of wonder why it isn't a content workflow in the background that triggers (say) a push to Fastly or Cloudflare to update a subset of cached content. Or maybe it is that, and that still takes 200 lambdas/sec.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

villgax 6y ago

And cue the vendor lock-in blogs from the future

anakaine 6y ago

The thing that kills me with this, is that it must be such a pain in the backside to build, scale, and manage. I'd love to make use of these technologies, and I work for a suitably large organisation - but I'm not a one man army and this requires a serious team with some serious depth to it, invested time and remuneration overheads. How do I handle users, roles, permissions, application logic, database, forms, content, publishing, etc? Wordpress. It may not be in vogue, but its all there and I can deploy it pretty quick. Is there a solution I can pick up that will run as a static site, make use of serverless, and not take forever to build out?

LarvaFX 6y ago
Investigate JAMStack.
- anakaine 6y ago
  Initial investigation reveals that this is just an index of static site generators and management interfaces that don't really address the points I raised.
prox 6y ago
There are some cms solutions up and coming that build on that kind of infrastructure, but I’ve seen nothing yet that can compete (for small teams) with Wordpress.
LarvaFX 6y ago
BTW wordpress can be used as a headless CMS. Your content creators use the wordpress interface and then you use it to build your static site from there. How much this is actually better than just using wordpress with cloudflare plugin, I don't know.
- anakaine 6y ago
  Yeah. Most CDNs and caching plugins deliver a substantially similar result in that regard I suspect. My sites rely a great deal on granular group permissions and contextual display of accessible items. Gut feel is id be coding for days to replicate tick box functionality.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

Not to knock Amazon here, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a publically funded British institution running on American-owned servers. I known we live in a Globalist world now, and even if the BBC ran their own servers it would probably be running on American produced hardware (Dell)... What do people think? Am I worrying about nothing?

louwrentius 6y ago
I can relate to this sentiment. I would rather have seen they host it physically within the borders of the country, with a 'good' local hosting/cloud provider. The added cost is the cost of that kind of 'security'.
- sofixa 6y ago
  It's probably hosted in AWS' London region, so at least geographically it's within the borders of the country.
  - mshook 6y ago
    CLOUD Act makes that completely moot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act Primarily the CLOUD Act amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
    - oyashirochama 6y ago
      The UK can do the same depending on situation to the US, granted the US can just ignore it if they really want to. Most modern countries have backdoor privacy systems, 5 eyes was literally designed for it since they can't spy on their own citizens, they have a group from another allied country do it and give them the info.
    - namdnay 6y ago

abhishektwr 6y ago

I never understood why media companies continue to reinvent the wheel. What’s commercial benefits if at all any? I guess, good for everyone’s CV. Build better media products, but no let’s build another publishing system.

LarvaFX 6y ago
What publishing system would you suggest, the BBC could use?
- abhishektwr 6y ago
  I am unable to suggest anything as I am out of touch these days. 5 years back every media CIO/CTO wanted to have Adobe AEM paired with Wordpress. Then they realised Adobe AEM is way too costly so decided to build authoring experience in-house but still using Wordpress and like for rendering and delivery. Recent trend use JAMStack/SSR for rendering. Don’t get me wrong it’s all great but doesn’t solve real problem media businesses face these days.
underwater 6y ago
I don't thing there is a mature, flexible CMS out there for publishers. AEM is more appropriate for marketing and old school web pages. Doesn't work for long lived content, journalism or publishing to diverse platforms and formats (AMP, native)
tiew9Vii 6y ago
> What's commercial benefits if at all any? That's the brilliant thing about the BBC. None, and it does not matter. It's a publicly funded organization. They cannot make money by law (excluding BBC World). Any organisation as large as the BBC design their online media around making users buy more products. UX, a/b testing, research, all about making you buy something even if you didn't want to buy it. If the website isn't trying to sell you something, it's trying to collect your information to sell or provide others opportunities to sell to you. For the BBC you have none of that. That means everyone working at the BBC is working on providing the best user experience and content where you freely choose to visit because of the quality and content. Even if you don't like the content, critique the site, disagree or find faults with it, that doesn't change the fact the people creating it believe it's the best experience for a user. I've yet to work anywhere with all development being driven by UX and the UX member being one of the most respected people on the team. Their metric for success is visitors happiness, not profit from sales. They are also on tighter budgets, a political target, and legally can't compete with other commercial organisations. That means they can't always do things as well as they can do as some company will complain they are stealing their customers. That's why IPlayer has stagnated as an example. While their current lambda rendering wouldn't be something I'd personally do or recommend, it's also likely not CV building. The BBC is a billion pound, large, corporate organisation. Change is hard, deviating from the norm is hard, sometimes the process can make it hard to get things done. So ending up where they are now was probably a gradual process of trialing things over the years, capabilities of staff skills, and so on. The BBC has many faults but the lack of "What's commercial benefit" makes for doing fantastic work. It was the only meaningful work I've done in my career so far.

dwardu 6y ago

Good, they need it especially with #DefundTheBBC going on

acruns 6y ago

Mostly off topic but as an american, I much prefer the calmer way news casters in the UK speak when delivering the news over the overly dramatic, exaggerated, weird tone that is used in the US.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
As a Brit, I agree. It makes the news show feel less like serious reporting, and more like a televised tabloid, bereft of sincerity. Journalism isn't meant to be an exercise in theatre. edit Thinking about it, the term news show relates back to my point about theatre. Perhaps I should try to use news programme instead. From a quick search, the BBC use both terms.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Just avoid some of the newspapers, lol.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

See also yesterday's thread, Moving BBC Online to the Cloud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967601 edit I see damagednoob got there first. edit 2: Looking at the before-and-after screenshots near the end of the post, it doesn't strike me as an obvious UI improvement. They've slightly shrunk the featured photo, they've reduced the contrast of the caption, and have made less efficient use of the available screen space, so that the top 3 lines of the article are no longer visible when it first loads.

robertlagrant 6y ago

If it were me, Kubernetes with Kubeless, so you can switch vendor or self-host relatively easily.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

The BBC has been using AWS for quite some time, although, obviously, not for everything as this article shows.

SkyLinx 6y ago

A more portable environment would have been Kubernetes with one of the several server less solutions for it.