SmartNews standardizes content delivery across 100+ endpoints on Amazon CloudFront

SmartNews operated more than 100 CDN delivery endpoints—supporting articles, images, advertisements, and other application services—that had accumulated over years of platform growth. Over time, these endpoints created a fragmented configuration environment with inconsistent ownership and limited standardization, making it increasingly complex for teams to manage changes across services.

“When you’re operating at that scale, even small configuration changes require careful coordination because they can affect multiple services at once,” says Ankit Singhal, senior staff software engineer, SmartNews, Inc.

The existing environment also limited insight into CDN-related costs. Although SmartNews maintained internal systems to attribute infrastructure spending across teams, its CDN platform provided limited visibility into how delivery routes and configuration decisions contributed to infrastructure usage. As the company increased its focus on infrastructure cost optimization, improving governance and cost attribution across CDN operations became a priority.

At the same time, SmartNews saw an opportunity to consolidate its CDN alongside infrastructure already running on AWS. However, migrating a large, long-running CDN environment required auditing legacy configurations across its content delivery endpoints, while completing the transition before the renewal of its existing CDN contract.

SmartNews migrated its content delivery platform to Amazon CloudFront, a globally distributed content delivery network that caches and delivers web content closer to users. The company also implemented AWS WAF to apply consistent security policies at the edge and protect applications from common web exploits.

Because configuration models differ significantly between CDN providers, SmartNews worked closely with AWS specialists to transfer its existing CDN architecture into Amazon CloudFront distributions. The team mapped legacy routing logic, caching behavior, and security rules to the new platform while maintaining delivery performance throughout the transition.

During the migration, engineers analyzed delivery patterns across its existing CDN configurations and grouped similar behaviors into reusable configuration templates. This approach helped the team eliminate redundant configurations and simplify how CDN behavior was managed across delivery endpoints.

“Previously teams often duplicated existing configurations and modified them. With standardized Amazon CloudFront patterns, engineers can now deploy configurations much more easily,” says Surya Asriadie, staff engineer, SmartNews.

SmartNews now manages CDN configurations through infrastructure-as-code workflows. Engineers deploy configuration changes through version-controlled pull requests, improving governance and providing clearer visibility into how configurations evolve over time.

“AWS folks were working as part of the team—it didn’t feel like they were a separate company. The collaboration helped us navigate a complex migration within a very tight timeline,” says Singhal. 

SmartNews migrated more than 100 content delivery endpoints to Amazon CloudFront in five months, establishing a standardized framework for managing content delivery across its platform. With support from AWS specialists, SmartNews reduced migration effort by 30 percent, allowing engineering teams to redirect time and resources toward higher-priority initiatives across the organization.

As part of the migration, engineers removed 40 redundant configurations and consolidated delivery behaviour into 70 optimized delivery paths. These standardized configuration patterns improved governance and reduced operational complexity across engineering teams, enabling faster configuration updates by over 60 percent and improving operational visibility across CDN services.

“With Amazon CloudFront, we now have much better visibility into how CDN routes contribute to infrastructure costs, which helps teams understand and manage their usage more effectively,” says Singhal. This improved visibility helps SmartNews identify optimization opportunities that contribute to ongoing infrastructure cost improvements of 30 percent.