Delivering content on breaking news stories to tens of millions of users per day requires fast, reliable infrastructure. The German news portal t-online, a subsidiary of leading German outdoor and digital advertiser  Ströer SE & Co. KGaA, had to overcome a challenge of the outdated infrastructure and technology powering its news portal which became difficult to maintain and offered limited scalability.

In short, t-online’s infrastructure urgently needed a sweeping digital transformation to support their growing user base. To achieve this, t-online migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking advantage of the simplicity and reliability of managed services to improve its entire organization. t-online is using a wide range of AWS services to accelerate its content delivery, reduce maintenance overhead, improve reliability, enhance productivity, and reduce cost by 30 percent.

Now, more than 47 million readers view t-online content every month across all channels. In breaking news situations, the t-online website can experience one billion page views per day. But the news organization has a long history. Going live in 1995, t-online is one of the oldest German websites. That is why the news portal needed to improve its monolithic infrastructure to support the scale and volatility of its usage. t-online ran its own data center on premises, but some of its infrastructure was close to 25 years old and difficult to maintain. The news portal’s modernization project was urgent because its infrastructure was at risk of becoming unstable. “We decided to transform our infrastructure as quickly as possible into a technology stack that we could use to iterate quickly on new ideas and support our growing business,” says Sven Scheffler, chief technology officer of t-online and chief operating officer of Ströer Content Group.

In 2015, Ströer defined a new editorial team with a mission to serve relevant journalism to all of Germany without a paywall. To deliver on this goal efficiently, it became crucial to modernize the news portal’s infrastructure, culture, and strategy. The news publisher chose to migrate to AWS after determining that AWS excelled at t-online’s three most important factors—quality of service, availability, and cost. “It was clear that AWS was the best choice for us to deliver in terms of speed, scalability, and quality,” says Scheffler.

t-online built the first proof of concept of its new architecture on AWS in the second quarter of 2020. The organization participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon the experience AWS has migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Over the next 2 years, t-online developed a completely new offering based on a modern content delivery architecture and a new headless content management system. The goal was to optimise the editorial workflows in addition to modernising the infrastructure. In parallel, verticals for finance, sports and weather were developed. With the launch of the new t-online portal in May 2022 and the decommision of the old infrastructure in autumn 2022, t-online has completed its transformation. “On AWS, it was simple to build a completely new infrastructure quickly with small, dedicated teams,” says Scheffler.

Now, t-online can set up new components with ease by using managed services on AWS. “We have built the crucial foundation,” says Scheffler. “We’ve secured the organization against downtime and prepared the teams to work in a fast and agile way on new products.” Because of the modernization, the entire organization can react faster to challenges and new ideas. “On AWS, we have reliable services that we can use to build new ideas and iterate quickly,” says Scheffler. “That has had the biggest impact on our workforce.” The news portal uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. It also uses AWS Fargate, which provides serverless compute for containers. By migrating to the highly scalable, managed services on AWS, t-online has achieved a 30 percent reduction in overall costs compared to its on-premises infrastructure.

Equally important is the scalability of the new infrastructure. Setting up live streams in scale with all the required equipment is normally costly and time consuming. When t-online decided to provide live streaming for the German federal election in 2021, it took t-online just 2 days of prototyping and few test runs before it was ready to go live. “This ability to set up live streaming in a short time and at very low costs on AWS is impressive,” says Scheffler.

To improve accessibility t-online designed its content delivery pipeline so that its news portal loads quickly with any advertising content included, even if the end customer has low bandwidth. The news portal is delivering its content using Amazon CloudFront, which businesses can use to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. Most of the content is stored in Amazon DynamoDB, which is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale. Achieving this fast website delivery speed changed the way t-online develops for other contexts too. Instead of building and designing individual, native apps for different mobile operating systems, the news publisher is simply inserting its responsive website into the t-online app, making updates much faster and simpler. “This shift in mindset has enormous impact,” says Scheffler. “From the day we launch a new product, it’s on every system. And anytime we want to update it, we can simply update the website, and the change will reflect instantly in the app.”

The modernizations of t-online using AWS resulted in an improved design, better availability, and loading speeds that are 30 percent faster. “With our new content delivery system on AWS, we’re delivering the website to the readers a lot faster,” says Scheffler. Productivity has also improved. The t-online journalists need 40 percent less time to publish an article as a result of the streamlined process. Overall, the infrastructure transformation of t-online has accelerated content production and delivery, improved accessibility, reduced cost by 30 percent, and given the news portal a foundation on which it can expand its user base and innovate with new features.

“t-online transformed from relying on a monolith in an on-premises data center to an agile, cloud native digital news publisher,” says Scheffler. “Not only did we solve our immediate challenges, but we also prepared the company for the future. This is why we love working on AWS.” CEO of Ströer Content Group Marc Schmitz says, “You know what’s best? The entire t-online site—across all platforms, whether on desktop or mobile—loads much faster than before. To be honest, it’s faster than any other news website in Germany, even with a bad connection.”