Amar Ujala Uses Amazon CloudFront to Reliably Deliver News to Over 100 Million People

Founded in 1948, Amar Ujala is one of India’s Hindi-language daily newspapers, with 20 editions in 7 states and one union territory. The newspaper’s online platform, Amarujala.com, serves as a prominent news website in India, providing news content and videos to a wide audience across the country. Its website and mobile app have more than 300 million monthly video views.

A high priority for Amar Ujala has always been ensuring high availability for its content. Nilesh Singh, solutions architect at Amar Ujala, “We can’t afford to have any application or system downtime since our customers rely on us for news around the clock.”

However, the company was facing challenges with its content delivery network (CDN) solution. “We occasionally encountered performance issues such as buffering, which disrupted access to our news stories and videos,” Singh says. “Moreover, many users throughout India have bandwidth and Internet connectivity challenges, which were causing further problems with reliability.”

Beyond solving these challenges, Amar Ujala sought a CDN solution that was more scalable than its existing system. “We’re growing and we want to expand our customer base, so scalability is very important,” says Singh.

To meet its high availability, performance, and scalability requirements, Amar Ujala decided to migrate its CDN to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We knew AWS is a reliable cloud service provider and would increase our scalability, and we also wanted to move to a microservices architecture with serverless capabilities, which AWS provides,” says Singh.

In late 2022, Amar Ujala began using AWS services, including Amazon CloudFront—a CDN specifically designed for high performance and security—to deliver daily news content. The solution serves data, videos, applications, and APIs to global users with high transfer speeds and low latency.

Amar Ujala also uses AWS Media Services to stream high-quality video and other digital content, and relies on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications.

Using Amazon CloudFront, Amar Ujala delivers digital news stories and videos to more than 100 million customers across India every day. “We’ve greatly improved reliability and high availability for content delivery by moving to Amazon CloudFront,” says Singh. “With Amazon CloudFront, we can ensure 99.999 percent uptime, so our users always get access to the stories and content they’re interested in. We have not had any downtime since moving to AWS.”

Furthermore, Amar Ujala has also improved its application performance. “We’ve improved performance by around 50 percent since the move to Amazon CloudFront,” Singh says. “That greatly impacts our customers by giving them a better overall experience downloading and viewing news content.”

Amar Ujala can now scale its applications when necessary, such as during special events. “Whenever there’s a breaking news event, we see large spikes in web traffic on amarujala.com,” says Singh. “By using Amazon CloudFront and migrating from a monolithic architecture to a modern microservices model with serverless technologies, we can reliably meet that demand. We look forward to growing far beyond our current 100 million customers on AWS.”

Looking ahead, Amar Ujala is evaluating AWS Elemental MediaLive—a live video encoding service—to deliver videos. “As a media company, we increasingly rely on videos, and we feel AWS Elemental MediaLive could make that easier,” Singh explains. “We know Amazon CloudFront and AWS will continue to help us scale our applications and give our customers a better experience.”