Toronto Star Case Study

2015

Star Media Group operates a portfolio of media businesses centered around the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, and thestar.com, one of the most visited newspaper websites in Canada.

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We enjoy uniformity and reliability like never before using AWS OpsWorks, and this saves dollars.”

Erik Kugel
Cloud Operations Specialist, Star Media Group

The Challenge

  • Migrated its internally designed content management system to Adobe CQ in 2012.
  • Administrators had to manually manage software deployments and environment configurations on a large number of servers. Manual management resulted in errors and inconsistencies.
  • Needed to repeatedly create identical environments to test software patches and updates. Scripting helped automate steps, but they still had to be manually executed on each server.


Why Amazon Web Services

  • Uses AWS OpsWorks to automate server configurations and app deployments.
  • Developers use OpsWorks to clone production stacks, allowing them to easily work with replicas of the production environment.
  • Administrators use Chef recipes to automate server configuration. When instances start, OpsWorks automatically runs the appropriate recipes on each server. Administrators use the infrastructure stack to manage app deployment using continuous integration with Jenkins.

The Benefits

  • Enabled consistent and efficient configuration of servers, reducing errors and allowing the team to focus on more productive tasks.
  • Reduced deployment time from three hours to 20 minutes.
  • Reduced risk of experimentation, allowing the Star to quickly spin up a stack for testing and eliminate it afterward.



About Toronto Star

Star Media Group operates a portfolio of media businesses centered around the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, and thestar.com, one of the most visited newspaper websites in Canada.


AWS Services Used

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet are automation platforms that allow you to use code to automate the configurations of your servers.

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