t-online Modernizes Its Infrastructure to Reduce Costs by 30% Using AWS

A flexible and reliable infrastructure is the key to delivering a great customer experience and sustaining growth and innovation for nearly 50 million monthly active users.

t-online, a subsidiary of Ströer SE & Co. KGaA, is a German digital media brand that delivers content and advertising on the web, mobile devices, digital billboards, and through voice assistants. t-online sees as many as 800 million page views per day for its website content and live updates.

Going live in 1995, t-online was one of the first websites in Germany. Having this long history and using an on-premises data center, some of t-online’s infrastructure was close to 25 years old in 2020, and important components were outdated, difficult to maintain and offered limited scalablility.

As a result, t-online had to make its infrastructure more resilient, maintainable, and cost efficient and was thus faced with a significant and urgent modernization task. At the same time, the news portal wanted to comprehensively improve its offering with modern usability, responsive design, and fast loading times, with the goal to become the benchmark in terms of speed. “We wanted to build the fastest-loading news portal on the market,” says Sven Scheffler, chief technology officer of t-online and chief operating officer of Ströer Content Group. To transform its infrastructure and overcome these challenges, t-online decided to migrate its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Transforming from Monolithic Architecture to Agile Microservices

To deliver growth, enhance speed and reliability, and scale to adapt to the needs of both its users and content producers, t-online needed to rebuild its architecture from scratch in the cloud. “The most important objective was transforming the company as quickly as possible to an agile DevOps product-development organization,” says Scheffler.

In 2020, t-online began using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon the experience AWS has supporting thousands of enterprise customers. t-online was able to analyze and decompose its core monolith, define pathways, and target cloud services. Using AWS MAP, t-online created the right governance, mitigated risks, and supported the transition with financial investments.

Throughout the modernization process, t-online also worked with AWS Enterprise Support, which provides concierge-like service with a focus on achieving success in the cloud. Included as part of AWS Enterprise Support is AWS Infrastructure Event Management (AWS IEM), which offers architecture and scaling guidance and operational support during the preparation and start of planned events, such as migrations. AWS IEM helps customers assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and implement their events confidently with AWS experts by their sides.

Support from the whole AWS team was valuable in learning how to use AWS services efficiently. “In only a few rare cases have I experienced this level of trust between two teams,” says Scheffler. “The AWS team supported our engineers as they worked to make our projects succeed. This is why we love working on AWS.”

Accelerating Content Delivery Using Managed and Serverless AWS Services

After about 2 years of development, t-online relaunched its news portal in May 2022. The news portal is now using Amazon CloudFront, which businesses can use to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. Now, t-online is delivering content to readers 30 percent faster, wherever they are. “The entire t-online portal across all platforms—whether on desktop or mobile—loads much faster than previously. To be honest, it’s one of the fastest news websites in Germany, even with a bad connection,” says Marc Schmitz, CEO of Ströer Content Group .

To deliver content at virtually any scale to its readers and to minimize the operational effort for its infrastructure, t-online chose to use serverless and managed services for both storage and compute.

For storing media files, t-online adopted Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a cloud object storage built to retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere. To store its news articles, the news portal uses Amazon DynamoDB, a key-value NoSQL database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at virtually any scale. And to power its content management system, t-online uses Amazon Aurora, which is designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at a global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

For compute, the news portal uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets users run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. t-online 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. “The total cost of ownership is a lot lower,” says Scheffler. “But the most important cost figure is our increased ability to improve the product.”

Improving the User Experience, Launching New Ideas Quicker, and Increasing Accessibility

t-online rolled out a new headless content management system on AWS, reducing the time to publish new content by 40 percent. The company did all this quickly and efficiently by taking advantage of the breadth of AWS services. “The more choices that we have, the easier it is for our development team to find the right fit in terms of services,” says Scheffler. “AWS is the perfect match for us.”

During its migration to AWS, t-online also built new user-facing products for financial information, sports, and weather data. “Our new simplified development strategy is a game changer,” says Scheffler. “So, we define how a feature looks and works once for the website. Then, we launch it on all devices using a single foundation on AWS.”

The scalability and reliability of AWS services are also crucial to t-online because traffic to news publications can be volatile. During Germany’s federal election in 2021, the website saw as many as one billion page views per day. “We did a huge live streaming event using AWS services and had the AWS support team in our offices,” says Scheffler. Although setting up live streaming studios is typically expensive and time consuming, t-online put it together with a small team in just 2 days.

t-online transformed 25 years’ worth of infrastructure to become flexible, scalable, and simple to manage in relatively little time. With its agile infrastructure on AWS, t-online’s most skilled engineers can quickly test new ideas and decrease time to market. The news portal is also considering several ideas to improve accessibility and expand its market reach. “Being able to react to new ideas and challenges quickly on AWS is so valuable,” says Scheffler. “We have prepared our teams to be fast and agile as we build new products and achieve new business outcomes in the future.”

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