The Dow Jones' Solution on AWS

Investors use Dow Jones to learn about what’s happening in financial markets throughout the world. “Our mission is to shine a light on dark corners of the world, focusing on news that impacts decision making,” says Stephen Orban, Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Technology. The company relies on cutting-edge technology to keep its customers as up to date as possible on the latest news.

In Asia, about 12.8 million people use WSJ.com, which generates about 90 million page views each month. When the lease on its Asian data center ran out in early 2013, the company needed to find an alternative that would help its developers focus more on revenue-generating applications instead of on data center maintenance. Dow Jones also wanted to reduce latency for its Asia-based customers—and it wanted to avoid delays for acquiring and configuring hardware. “My preference is to have my team build products rather than running data centers, Orban says. “Now that data center is a commodity, that’s exactly what they’re able to do.”

Dow Jones chose AWS because it helps enable the company improve time to market for its products. “Our applications were dependent on a particular database version,” Orban says, “and a lot of redirect logic was done on a hardware load balancer. All of the non-AWS software we use work on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), making it possible to lift and shift, and work on optimizing the environment down the road.”

It took the company about six weeks to move from its Hong Kong data center to AWS. The WSJ.com product running on AWS Tokyo leverages multiple Availability Zones on Amazon EC2 instances to run Dow Jones app code and Oracle databases. Elastic Load Balancing instances are used to route application traffic between services, third-party load balancers are used to balance user traffic, and WAN accelerators are used to improve database replication. Dow Jones is also using Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (Amazon IAM), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
   Dow Jones is now running all its Asia traffic through AWS. “Using AWS helps Dow Jones to be more agile in developing revenue-generating products,” Orban says. “Thanks to AWS, we now build more products and spend less time running a data center. Our overall product development velocity has increased by at least 30 percent.”
• [Cost Reduction - Data Management]
  The company has also realized cost savings of 25 percent, more than $40,000 per year, over the cost of leasing a data center—and the savings will continue each year that they use AWS. “We’ll never have to refresh the hardware. That constitutes significant savings for Dow Jones,” Orban says.